Where are you speaking from, comrade?
During the events of May ’68, it was common practice to question a stranger in this way if they wished to speak at a General Assembly, in order to ascertain their social position (at the time, people spoke of ‘classes’) and thus their legitimacy to speak. The historian Philippe Artières, who co-curated the exhibition Images en Lutte: The Visual Culture of the Far Left in France (1968–1974) at Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2018, has been conducting research since the 1990s into ‘minor’ writing and archives.
