Yomango

Yomango is an independent franchise created in Barcelona, Spain, in 2002 by tactical media practitioners who take shoplifting as an activist practice. The name is a word play referencing the Spanish denim brand Mango; it is also slang for “to borrow” and “to take things under your sleeve.”

Yomango transforms the hidden, individual act of shoplifting into a carnivalesque gesture, collectively shared and publicly exposed. Yomango practitioners claim they are a network that intends to build a revolution of desire by mimicking the logic of corporate capital. “You want it? You have it!”—one of Yomango's slogans—describes the peculiar process of consumption enacted in their actions, a process in which the desire to have an item is followed by its acquisition without money mediation.

Yomango's presentation in society took place in June 2002 in Barcelona in what was to be “The first Yomango fashion show.” A Yomango “model” got into the famous department store Bershka and, slipping past the security systems, she left the premises wearing a dress for which she had not paid. A large group of Yomango sympathizers were waiting outside to celebrate the event, which had been previously announced. The €9,500 dress was then exhibited as a relic of a Yomango action in the CCCB (the Barcelona Center of Contemporary Culture), and some weeks later, it was returned in the men's division of Zara, another Spanish garment chain. Yomango contacted both companies, Bershka and Zara, to notify them of the dress action.

Yomango Tango was another important action, performed on December 2002 to commemorate the anniversary of the Argentinean popular outburst of December 19 and 20, 2001. The two-step action took place in a supermarket and in a bank branch, both part of the pool of responsible parties alleged to have contributed to Argentina's bankruptcy. In solidarity with the Argentinean social movements, and to celebrate the creative responses that these social agents carried out to alleviate their urgent needs, Yomango dancers went to a Carrefour supermarket and, after a stylized tango choreography, they grabbed some bottles of champagne and proceeded to take them outside, under the disconcerted gaze of the security guards. The action continued in a branch of the targeted bank, the Banco Santander, where Yomango closed its celebration with a sarcastic toast.

Even though Yomango's actions are sometimes criticized as a bourgeois gesture of minor disruption that never benefits those in real need, Yomango activists participate in the anti-globalization movement, and its tactics have spread globally, especially in Mexico, Germany, Chile, and Argentina. For those who see these actions as reprehensible, as somewhat indistinguishable from regular shoplifting, Yomango responds that their point is not possession and accumulation but the creation of a lifestyle that recaptures what has been taken from people by corporations: desire. By intervening within the channels of commodity circulation [Page 1503]such as advertisements, brand presentations, franchising campaigns, and so on, Yomango reflects back to the market, to denounce its logic and call attention to the capitalist takeover of public spaces and modes of being. Through its satirical actions, Yomango proposes other, more creative and socially shared, uses of the private and the public, the artistic and the extra-artistic, the social and the personal, and the legal and the legitimate.

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