Yomango

YOMANGO ("Mango" is a popular Spanish clothing chain. YOMANGO, in Spanish slang means 'I steal'. 'manga' - Spanish for sleave, hence 'mangar', to sleave, to stea]) is a brand name, which like all other major brand names is not so much about selling concrete stuff, but more about promoting a lifestyle. In this case, the YOMANGO lifestyle - shoplifting as a form of social disobedience and direct action against multinational corporations.

A few months ago a local group organized the first YOMANGO fashion show in Barcelona. Its july 5th of 2002. The end of the season sales are at full swing and the area is full of the weekend shopping crowd. The fashion show took place at Breshka, one of the most popular stores geared towards teenagers. The YOMANGO models cross the imaginary frontier between the store and the street dressed in huge mouths, eating everything that comes their way. Giant forks push merchandise around from one shelf to another. This arbitrary frenzy, creates chaos in the store, and a reckless happiness in the hearts of the public present.

A criminalizing media campaign, using the police as a main source, is cleverly countered by YOMANGO's communication strategy: while newspapers report: "alternative youth and antiglobalization activists vandalize and cause damage in Barcelona's city center", YOMANGO exhibited publicly, as part of a famous cultural festival, the ridiculous result of the fashion show's 'expropriation': an ugly blue dress, on sale for 9 euros and 50 cents.

Not even a misdemeanor according to spanish law.

1. YOMANGO promotes shoplifting as a form of disobedience and direct action against multinational corporations.

2. Dare to desire: YOMANGO is your style: risky, innovative. It is the articulate proliferation of creative gestures. Yomango is not about theft, its about magic, about the liberation of desire and intelligence crystalized in the "things" offered for sale. If YOMANGO has a politics, it is the politics of happiness, of putting the body first. Be happy, insultingly happy. YOMANGO: feel pretty!

3. Because you can't buy happiness. Capitalism currently works through the exploitation of collective intelligence and creativity. The market nurishes itself on the ideas, the life forms and the multiple ways in which people express themselves through words, clothes, gestures, sexuality... Commerce appropriates your desires, your expectations, your experiences and gives them back to you, alienated, distant, converted into "things" for you to buy. Buy your own happiness, from concentrates. The YOMANGO style proposes reappropriating, legitimizing and extending the "expropriation" of what is, in effect, previously to its conversion into "things", was part of the commons. YOMANGO, its very much inside of you.

4. Inventing new gestures that, once repeated, open new worlds for us to inhabit. "Buying" is an excercise in passivity. Boring and alienating, it is a socially predetermined act. YOMANGO is a creative and exciting practice. "Stealing" is understood to be a crime, but YOMANGO does not acknowledge legalities or illegalities. More so, it speaks of a kind of legitimacy which comes from below, the legitimacy of daily life, of wanting to live freely, creatively.

Buying is an action based on obedience. YOMANGO is a disobedient style YOMANGO is the hand, which in an irreducible insubordinate dance, draws an unmediated arch of desire from the stand to your pocket, without money or credit cards.

5. YOMANGO is not the propagation of private property through other means. It does not propose accumulation. It consists in taking to the extreme the free circulation of goods. Potlacht!: reapropriate and make circulate, satisfy the desires and necessities of your loved ones. Have people over for YOMANGO dinners. Steal this text!

6. The market offers us a false alternative, a false freedom to choose between one way to spend our money or another. Your hopes and dreams be them of one brand or another, almost always benefit the same guy. YOMANGO affirms the real alternative: It's either money or YOMANGO!

7. YOMANGO turns the mall into a playground. These supposed public spaces, where the market commercializes, regulates and controls our basic wish to live shared experiences, these human antfarms that cross leisure and culture. YOMANGO breaks out of the isles and defies dreary routines.

8. YOMANGO is with you in every daily gesture you make. It's with you during your best moments. Those that don't cost money. YOMANGO systematizes daily acts. In Barcelona, the YOMANGO franchise held civil disobedience workshops adapted to the YOMANGO lifestyle, as well as workshops where imaginative and useful tools were produced. Also, encounters, discussions, dinners, parties, all for the public to enjoy.

9. YOMANGO is a franchise you can form wherever you want. The YOMANGO style is an open ended process, generating tools, prototypes and dynamics which flow and proliferate, waiting to be reapropriated and to circulate. A brand name that's everyones. That is born from and for the commons. Remember:YOMANGO, only in your closest multinational.