"A youth disturbed too often by the future." The Situationist International was a very small group of international political and artistic agitators with roots in Marxism, anarchism and the early 20th century European artistic avant-garde. Formed in 1957, the Situationists were active in Europe through the 1960s and aspired to major social and political transformations. In the 1960s it split into a number of different groups, including the Situationist Bauhaus, the Antinational and the Second Situationist International. The first SI disbanded in 1972. Many of the kinds of imagery that would appear on modern patches and posters would date back and have some kind of debt to this group and movement. This is a commonly appropriated image that we feel is important to note the context and origins with the situationists.

"Unite our country's workmen". The Situationist International was formed at a meeting in the Italian village of Cosio d'Arroscia on 28 July 1957 with the fusion of several extremely small artistic tendencies, which claimed to be avant-gardistes: Lettrist International, the International movement for an imaginist Bauhaus (an off-shoot of COBRA), and the London Psychogeographical Association. The groups came together intending to reawaken the radical political potential of surrealism. The group also later drew ideas from the left communist group Socialisme ou Barbarie.

The most prominent French member of the group, Guy Debord, has tended to polarise opinion. Some describe him as having provided the theoretical clarity within the group; others say that he exercised dictatorial control over its development and membership; yet others believe that he was a powerful writer but a second-rate thinker. Other members included the Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys, the Italo-Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi, the English artist Ralph Rumney (sole member of the London Psychogeographical Society, Rumney suffered expulsion relatively soon after the formation of the Situationist International), the Scandinavian artist Asger Jorn (who after parting with the SI also founded the Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism), the veteran of the Hungarian Uprising Attila Kotanyi, the French writer Michele Bernstein, and Raoul Vaneigem. Debord and Bernstein later married.

Translating to "reform chloroform", this patch dates back to the Atollayah Popollay (someone please help with my butchered spelling); where a privileged group of French student artists and printers aligned themselves with the striking workers and printed this image originally as a poster and then later as other pieces of iconography to bring the workers' plight more into the public eye. This kind of simple imagery and solidarity act has had huge influence on virtually every movement to follow since the 1960s and created many of the types of patches that you see nowadays. Because of this we feel like it's very important to cite our sources and offer up this image as a slice of history that people can know that radical imagery predates Cristy Road.

Translating approximately to "Return to the normal", this patch also stems back to the Situationist movement. Situationist ideas have continued to echo profoundly through many aspects of culture and politics in Europe and the USA. Even in their own time, with limited translations of their dense theoretical texts, combined with their very successful self-mythologisation, the term 'situationist' was often used to refer to any rebel or outsider, rather than to a body of surrealist-inspired Marxist critical theory. As such, the term 'situationist' and those of 'spectacle' and 'detournement' have often been decontextualised and recuperated.