Rise of Situationist International

The Situationist International was a small group of avant-garde artists and political thinkers who came together at a conference in the Italian village of Cosio d'Arroscia. Its leading figure was the French writer and filmmaker Guy Debord, joined by artists such as Asger Jorn. The group argued that modern capitalist life had turned experience into spectacle, and it proposed playful tactics such as the derive, an unplanned drift through the city, and detournement, the reuse of existing images and texts to subvert their meaning. Debord's book The Society of the Spectacle appeared in 1967 and was widely read. The movement influenced the student protests of May 1968 in France, and it dissolved in the early 1970s after years of expulsions and disputes.

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