Violence Conference
State Violence as Practice
Convened and organised by Jane Tynan and Mick Wilson
Open to art-based and non-art-based researchers, this strand invites a dialogue across academic disciplines and artistic practices with respect to violence and statecraft. Weber, building upon themes from Bodin and Hobbes, famously asserts that ”physical force is specific and intrinsic to the state.” For Weber, the state is the form of human community laying “claim to the monopoly on the legitimated use of physical force.” However, as the wide currency of the terms biopolitics, thanatopolitics and necropolitics attests, the state’s intrinsic violence unfolds in concrete practices, techniques, apparatuses and imaginaries that cannot be fully specified with reference solely to discourses of representation, legitimacy and sovereignty. What are the current forms of enquiry and research that explore state violences through consideration of material culture, quotidian practice and bodily comportments? In what ways might designers, theatre-makers, choreographers, musicians, film-makers, authors, artists and other makers be shaping and contributing to these research agendas? Can the encounter across academic disciplines, artistic practices and multiple constituencies foster new critical insight into the state’s many violences?
Plenary Description
Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh, Denise Ferreira Da Silva & Doreen Mende
Turning the inextricable [or, intractable] condition against itself
“Violence is at the beginning of thinking; it is the thing of thought, of reason.” Violence is also the thing of art. This is not a dilemma. But a matrix. Violence marks the rule of law moving away from violence as an event as if it could be restituted by denouncing a name or tracing a date. Instead, the contribution wishes to problematize violence as an inextricable condition from which there is neither an escape nor an excuse nor an apology. This condition has always been formative and will inextricably continue to affect art as a concept and a practice of transcendental reason. Put differently, art is implicit as well as complicit with the rule of law (and signification) legitimizing colonial (juridical) and racial (symbolic) violence. There is an end to this only possibly at the end of art as we know it.
Before this beginning, that is, before the declaration of what thought and art is, the practices of research––the promises of the curious, the progressive, the inquisitive and exquisite, the new and advanced, the explorative, or the actual––enabled the making of the inextricable condition for art to become onto-epistemological building blocs of the architectures of museums, academies and libraries; these are the infrastructures for culturalizing and normalizing violence’s political economy of expropriation, dispossession, analysis and value-systems in the name of art.
The contribution continues a shared reflection from a conference/public meeting On Violence (it makes us think of a dance and a fête as much as of war) where Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh performativly invoked a set of digitized photographs from Burj al-Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp near Tyr, Lebanon, with the care to interrupt the vicious circle of violence when making them public in art, which has been responded by Denise Ferreira da Silva with the proposal of “Reading Art as Confrontation” in conversation with Doreen Mende in Dublin in 2014. Our participation in the 4th Biennial PARSE Research Conference would allow us to articulate a performative continuation across temporalities, memories, geographies and practices reflecting how to cope with violence as an inextricable condition in art.
Schedule
Day 1 - Wednesday17 Nov 2021
12.00-14.00
Border Techniques
Federica BuetiAngeliki Dimaki-AdolfsenEvie PapadaAmin Parsa
Location: online
Moderator: Mahmoud Keshavarz
Federica Bueti Monstrous Intimacies. Notes on the myth of “Mediterranean values” and a call for de-mediterraneification
“All the Mediterranean values–the triumph of the human individual, of clarity, and of beauty–become lifeless, colorless knickknacks. All those speeches seem like collections of dead words; those values which seemed to uplift the soul are revealed as worthless, simply because they have nothing to do with the concrete conflict in which the people is engaged.”
(Fanon, Concerning Violence in The Wretched of the Earth)
On November 28 1946, in Melissa, a small town in the province of Catanzaro, in Calabria, the region in Southern-Italy where I come from, the herdsman of a local baron opened fired and killed, with a bullet in the abdomen, the 31-year-old communist peasant and fighter Giuditta Levato, who was seven months pregnant with her third child. The violence unleashed on the body of Levato is one that cuts deep in and through the body and histories, past and present, of this region, of the struggle for land for the autonomy of the peasants of Southern Italy, which for the reasons of the newly born Nation-State and the forces of fascism constructed as the “cradle of the Greek-Roman empire” of that “Mediterranean culture” which Camus tries to recuperate and celebrates and which Fanon rejects and wants to decolonize.
Angeliki Dimaki-Adolfsen, Dr. Evie Papada Bordering visibilities in the intersection of cultural geography and design studies.
The new borders of Europe as they have been shaped the last years, perform different forms of violence on the bodies of cross-borders before, during and after their journey. Meanwhile, the counter-mapping and documentation of such violent border practices have also intensified across disciplines. We witness an evolution of the use of visual material that departs from the classical reporting of international human right organizations and moves towards new artistic and design forms of representation (Azoulay 2008; McLagan and McKee 2012; Weizman 2017). Bringing together cultural geography and design studies, we aim to construct a theoretical and methodological bridge between the two disciplines that questions current modes of migration studies and disciplinary frames.
In order to do that we borrow empirical material from our two distinct inquiries into asylum vulnerability assessments and play spaces respectively. Located within Greece´s “hotspot approach”, they have generated similar evidence of state violence, performed by border authorities and humanitarian actors. In particular, we consider the complex bureaucratic processes that seek to assign vulnerability onto asylum seekers and the demarcation of physical as play spaces that present examples of different forms of state violence mapping into an extremely tangible hotspot borderscape. Drawing on methodological insights from cultural cartography and design visualizations we question the current modes of analyzing and visualizing migration (policies) in such contexts and suggest integrated forms of mapping to make sense of such phenomena.
Amin Parsa European borders
This contribution investigates the development and operation of the European Border Surveillance System (Eurosur) as an example state violence as practice. It will be argued that the on-going exposure of the people on the move to various forms of violence is made possible, among others, through the technological operation of Eurosur. In specific it will be shown that Eurosur re-enforces the Mediterranean as the historical site of ongoing violence through a) producing new knowledge of border crossing in contrast to traditional legal definitions b) giving an operational form to the expansionist imaginaries of the European jurisdiction through invention of an extra-legal space called European External Border.
14.30-16.15
Internal wars
Rodrigo AzaolaLou BarzaghiIvana Mancic
Location: online
Moderator: Mick Wilson
Rodrigo Azaola 1812-2016
Rodrigo Azaola’s “1812-2016” is a reinterpretation of Charles Minard’s map of the Napoleonic Campaign in Russia (Carte figurative des pertes successives in hommes de l’Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813) focused in the context of the Mexican Drug War initiated in 2006. Based on the same kind of informational flow chart as Minard, 1812-2016 records specific events and geographic locations related chronologically and describes the yearly increase of victims correlating it with cocaine retail cost, whose price does not register greater variation. Like Minard’s Map, this apparently simple cartographic description seeks to visually represent the Mexican Drug War, in which state violence, by omission or commission, is at the forefront of a catastrophic, ongoing and uncorrected military campaign that has forever changed Mexico’s history
Clara Barzaghi Medellín’s images from drug capital to social urbanism: materializations of systemic violence and death power.
Systemic violence is foundational of colonial societies and its codification throughout time has gone through different forms to occupy territories. State-sanctioned violence that underlies colonial organization recalls the borders’ conflicts of the so-called Conquer of the Americas and it has been ever since actualized through recodifications concerning who are those assigned as “savages”, “criminals”, always those who come from the outside, the conceptual Other. Such violence is often named as justice and materializes itself constantly in the urban space, seen in the centrality of urban violence in Latin American concerns by the late of the 20th century and the beginning of the present one. What is proposed here is a cartography of ways of death power managing population and how it designs urban space, focusing in Medellín, Colombia, a city which image in 20 years changed from drug trafficking world’s capital to city laboratory of urban and security interventions in the name of the “War on Drugs”. In a context where security becomes more and more a commodity and considering a scenario whereby “war on terror” policies were adapted to Latin War on Drugs after George W. Bush’s Patriot Act what’s at stake is to understand how during the 1990s and the 2000s Medellín’s images were produced among the city’s renewal itself, never letting aside the sanctioned violence named as justice that operates by the “borderization” of entire portions of the population, understood as “criminals”. Such discourses (understood as a set of praxis) combine urban planning with national security policies, and convoke, in the name of democracy and security, the civilian population to engage in the production of monitored and policed spaces, resulting in borderization, marking people who are already born death-bounded and delegated to death camps in the middle of the city.
Ivana Mancic “Merciful Angel “ bombing operation
Personal narratives are works that situate history, society and the individual voice, and this very intersection of the personal and the societal is a new vantage point that allows for a unique contribution to social science, and artistic research. (Laslett, 1999, p. 392)
My research uses auto-ethnography as a qualitative method of narrative writing which focuses on experience (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p. 2) and addresses the issues of identity and belonging surrounding the Yugoslav Civil war by offering my personal narrative in relation to loss and disappearance resulting from the exposure to crisis, migrations, war and sanctions in the nineties and the1999 “Merciful Angel “operation of bombing of Serbia by NATO.
What defines this personal narrative is how the Yugoslav Civil war, being world- known for its horrors and immense brutality, ethnic cleansing, mass rapes, lost homelands, lost hope and identity- both national and gender, had a great impact on both feminists and women across the world and its effects had a huge transnational importance (Batinić, 2001).
As a response to war, certain Serbian women, pacifists, and artists appeared on the public scene using art to criticize the patriarchal nature of the society and war and act against it (Martin, 2012). This emerging female voice represents a unique step of acknowledgment, responsibility and memory. The importance of this research lies in contributing to the new knowledge by presenting original artistic artefact and a testimony to add to the female voice in this respect.
The photographic art practice (archival, site-writing and microscope photography) addresses personal traumas resulting from the war, exteriorised with the intention of making a statement (Grey, Mallins, 1993, p.7). Therefore, the purpose of photographs included within the narrative is to serve as a medium to enable witnessing and testify on behalf of my personal experience in order to illustrate facets of cultural experience (Ellis, Bochner, 2011, p.4)
Day 2 - Thursday18 Nov 2021
12.45-15.00
Systemics
Jumanah AbbasOla HassanainEleni MichaelidiSharon Daniel
Location: online
Moderator: Mick Wilson
Jumanah Abbas (Un)mapping the Jawlan
On the 13th of February, 1982, a massive crowd gathered in the town square of Majdal Al Shams, a town once part of Syria, is now currently in the occupied territories of Golan Heights (Jawlan in Arabic). During the six month protest, children, women, religious leaders, and activists were demanding for rights to their land, to their identity as the Arab Jawlani, to their language and existence. As a form of retaliation, the Israeli army surrounded each town left in the Golan Heights, blocking roads and closely monitoring each movement while knocking on each home to distribute the newly issued Israeli ID for the Jawlani community. Families and individual rejected to be part of the Israeli state, choosing to be identified as stateless instead. Yet, the pscyho-social experience of the violence has disrupted the lived experience of the Jawlani communities, causing a series of counter-reactions to the Israel’s perpetual violence, which is continually imposed, and yet normalized. For instance, the annexed territories of the Golan Heights are drawn to be part of the Israel state in school textbooks; Jawlani youth are encouraged to enroll to the Israeli army, study at Israeli Universities and institutes and enjoy the full benefits of an Israeli citizen. To that end, encroachment comes in all forms, and in all sets of representation. As the erasure of the Jawlani community is purposefully intentional, how can we repurpose tools of mapping to reverse the power inscribed in representation and begin to include the voices of the Jawlani community? This proposal is a screening of ten short video essays that combine 3D modellings, oral narratives, images, and videos visualizing the untold story of the occupation in its political, socio-economic and cultural elements. Each video reflects on a particular element, while collectively documenting the Jawlani’s resistance to the occupation.
Ola Hassanain Open-air constellations
I present my Artistic-Research: ‘A Thought of the Outside’ where I position ‘space as political discourse’ that can help us exist outside state terror. I propose that in the quest for organising to escape spatiality bound by domination of the state, the ‘affilial formations’ of political intervention, social work and NGOs (which arise as the main mode of amassing counter narratives and assembling) surface as provisional, yet the physicality of space -the material site where all of these dire conditions happen- remains/continues on. I unpack the supposition that there is evidence that every political phenomenon casts a spatial shadow, but we do not know how to see it due to our spatial literacy investing in materiality. I use the case of the Women’s Food and Tea Sellers’ Cooperative’s banning from operating in public spaces in Khartoum. This ban followed a long history of calls to ‘organise’ by NGOs relying on formalisation language and structuring as political engagement. I draw parallels of how the patterns of presence of tea ladies in the street denoted the open-air as geographically missing from the spatial organisation of the city – what is situated as ‘outdoors’- and our spatial literacy as architects, it is an architecture element that has not managed to create physical bounded-ness ; but it has pushed inside of it all that was not being regulated by materiality, implicating the open-air as a derivative of the state politics & how far the state’s reach goes through the physical environment. The open-air above the streets and notions of ‘invisible labour’ offered by the tea ladies cooperative appear as a twofold of State terror, affirmed by the Sovereignty Council banning the Cooperative association for women from speaking out against transitional government for failure to compensate/ support tea ladies through the Pandemic in June 2020.
Eleni Michaelidi Breathing exercises in Athens. Artistic responses to systemic violence against LBGTQI+ communities and individuals: the case of the murder of Zak Kostopoulos/ZackieO
On September 21, 2018, in the vicinity of Omonia Square, at the center of Athens, Greece, an extremely brutal murder took place. Zak Kostopoulos aka ZackieO, a young queer artist, activist, and prominent member of the local LBGTQI+ communities, was brutally beaten to death in plain sight and broad daylight. For reasons still unclear, Zak was being chased and tried to find “refuge” in a nearby jewelry shop. The shop owner, joined by a group of men, brutally lynched Zak, who was laying down severely injured and clearly incapable of posing any threat. The beating continued after the police arrived at the scene, with their active participation. Zak was declared dead once brought to the hospital, unconscious yet still handcuffed. In presenting the victim as abnormal, marginal and intoxicated, a collateral damage in a series of “unfortunate events”, the national mass media amplified and complemented the exercised violence. And although the entire sequence of events was recorded in full detail on cellphone cameras by various passers-by, there were plenty of witnesses and evidence on site, the police made practically no effort to investigate the murder. The victim’s family and community initiatives have taken it up upon themselves to shed light to the case, preparing for the upcoming trial. A prominent case of extreme systemic violence – racist, patriarchal, suppressive, class, “intrinsic state violence” – the case of Zak/ZackieO’s murder exemplified the aggressiveness that is deeply rooted in greek society and the nation state. Against this backdrop, and amongst other implications, there have been many artistic responses that stemmed out of or were deeply influenced by this event. Whether pursuing accountability, dealing with trauma, or exploring alternatives, such artworks function as “breathing exercises” – gestures of healing, regaining strength and finding ways to cope with systemic state violence individually and collectively.
Sharon Daniel EXPOSED: Documenting the spread of COVID-19 in the carceral state
In the 15th century, Venetians invented Quarantine as a protection against the plague. In the Mid-20th century, Americans invented a criminal punishment system based on the model of Quarantine in which the disproportionately poor, Black, or Brown ‘offender” is treated as a pathogen to be isolated and contained. In the 21st century, COVID-19, an actual pathogen, has both exposed and intensified the brutality of that system — prisoners have been stranded in quarantine without adequate food or medication, abandoned and unseen. In the US over 2 million people are confined in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe environments. Prisoners cannot practice social distancing or use hand sanitizer and are regularly subjected to medical malpractice and neglect. In the context of the conference thread addressing “Documentary and the Politics of Information,” this hybrid paper/artist presentation will focus on the interactive documentary EXPOSED, which provides a cumulative public record and evolving history of the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on incarcerated people. EXPOSED, documents the spread of COVID-19, over time, inside prisons, jails, and detention centers across the US, from the perspective of prisoners and their advocates. Original interviews, along with quotes, audio clips, and statistics collected from a comprehensive array of online publications and broadcasts, are assembled into an interactive timeline that, on each day, offers abundant testimony to the risk and trauma prisoners experience under coronavirus quarantine. The scale of the project is intended to reflect the scale of the crisis. For July 8th alone, the timeline includes over 100 statements made by prisoners afflicted with the virus or enduring anxiety, distress, and neglect. The monochrome, image-less, headline-styled interface, which allows viewers to step through thousands of prisoners’ statements, is designed to visualize their collective suffering and signal that the injustices they endure are structural.
17.15-19.15
War Bodies
Laura McAtackneyCatherine Baker
Location: online
Moderator: Jane Tynan
Laura McAtackney Planning as Class Violence: the case of Troubles and post-conflict Belfast
There have been a number of analyses of the material culture of the low-lying conflict colloquially known as the Troubles in Northern Ireland – especially the enduring role of so-called peace walls and the use of wall murals in the conflict and post-conflict state – but there is still a reticence to explore these manifestations as the logical result of policies of the state. Often analyses of the Troubles and peace process are reduced down to a two-community thesis, which refuses to name the role of both the British and (to a lesser extent) the Irish state in shaping and directing the society. This paper will focus on the role of planning as violence – as evidenced throughout the conflict and peace process – and will argue that if one takes into account the uses of town planning and road building in the past half century then one cannot ignore its role as state-sponsored structural violence. In particular, it is through exploring the ongoing material repercussions of seemingly mundane planning decisions that one can see planning as an attempt to carve up, separate and displace working class communities that have added to the trauma and ongoing nature of the conflict itself. This paper will focus on the site of an infamous atrocity – the bombing of McGurks Bar in North Belfast in December 1971 – to show how the city has attempted to disappear places associated with unresolved conflict. It will trace the role of activists and families in enduring and subverting those attempts to plan their lives – and deaths – out of existence.
Catherine Baker Making War on Bodies: militarisation, aesthetics and embodiment in international politics since the Covid-19 pandemic
In March 2020, I and a team of contributors published our edited volume Making War on Bodies: Militarisation, Aesthetics and Embodiment in International Politics. This volume, which comes out in paperback in November 2021, responded to the ‘aesthetic’ and ‘embodied’ turns in the study of international politics which were making bodies a defining theme in current research on war and the military, and were employing innovative methods that made explicit the aesthetics of experiencing and representing war. Together, we sought to intertwine those aesthetic and embodied turns to offer a fresh lens on militarism and processes of militarisation, through tracing the aesthetics of how bodies perceive and the aesthetics of how bodies are perceived across a globally and institutionally diverse range of case studies, ranging from British infantry training or the memorialisation of war trauma in Australia to radical right-wing fashion in Croatia, insurgent aesthetics in the Middle East and Cuba, the Black Panthers’ revolutionary aesthetics, and animal memes in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Yet the very month when our volume was published was also the month where many of the countries we studied, lived in and worked were entering the first lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic. Images such as the Spanish military entering abandoned care homes or troops lined up in the UK’s hastily-erected Nightingale hospitals evoked a sense of dystopian shock, to be replaced by adjustment to the callous and in many ways invisible violence of a global system that has been unable to suppress Covid-19. Accordingly, this contribution asks what fresh articulations of militarisation, aesthetics and embodiment – if any – might have emerged since the pandemic began.
Day 3 - Friday19 Nov 2021
12.45-15.15
Violent Imaginaries
Carl Johan Erikson & Björn LarssonPatricia LorenzoniLisa GodsonCristina Silvia Dogaru
Location: online
Moderator: Jane Tynan & Mick Wilson
Carl Johan Erikson and Björn Larsson Direct award contracts for a short film about medical age assessment
We would like to present our work, “Direct award contracts for a short film about medical age assessment”, 2019, which can be seen as an attempt to shed light on overall state power and the exercise of authority by studying a limited part of the Swedish state bureaucracy seen through the production of an information film – “En film om medicinsk åldersbedömning”(A film on medical age assessment. In the method medical age assessment, which is currently used by Swedish authorities, we see contemporary ideas about rationality that carry a historical legacy of physical anthropology as a science in Sweden, with roots in the early 20th century. Presentation format: • Performative reading from our book “Direct award contracts for a short film about medical age assessment”, 2019. • Screening of the information film “A film about medical age assessment”, 3m 33 s. The book “Direct award contracts for a short film on medical age assessment”, 2019, contains public p documents requested from the The national Board of Forensic Medicine (RMV). The documents deal with the production of the information film made for RMW by the film production company Populate in 2016–2017 following a so-called direct procurement. The film’s target group is young people seeking asylum in Sweden who cannot prove their age with identity documents. In these cases, the Swedish Migration Agency offers the asylum seeker to undergo a dental X-ray and magnetic camera examination of the knee. With the examinations as a basis, RMV makes a medical age assessment, and a forensic doctor writes a forensic medical statement which describes in words the probability that the asylum seeker is over or under 18 years of age. The Swedish Migration Agency uses the statement as part of its assessment of the asylum seeker’s age and decides whether he or she should be considered a child or an adult. “Direct award contracts for a short film about medical age assessment” is part of the artistic research project “Refuse to Kill – stories about the unarmed men”, supported by Swedish research Council. Link to the book. Link to the information film.
Patricia Lorenzoni Violent traces, violence of law: The reading of asylum documents
I will present a tentative method, informed by fiction and poetry, for the reading of asylum documents. The blatant contradiction in the continuing claims from formal democracies on guaranteeing human rights while at the same time radically undermining the right to asylum, puts us into certain difficulties when working with the growing contemporary archive consisting of documentation of asylum processes. How, in the reading of and writing about such processes, do we avoid the pitfalls both of reproducing the dehumanization in these documents, and in claims of speaking for the one denied a place from which to speak? With the help of Harry Martinson’s novel Vägen till Klockrike (published 1948, translated into English as The Road 1955) narrated from the position of the vagrant, and Elisabeth Hjorth’s discussion on ethical readings dialoguing with Spivak and Butler, I ask in what ways poetic writing as well as methods of reading from the tradition of literary studies can help us – both when we work with the violence of law embedded in asylum documents as our material, and when we try to work against that violence.
Lisa Godson The penis of the government, the mirror of the government: the vaginal speculum and state violence, 1820-1890
This paper will concentrate on the design and use of the vaginal speculum in relation to state violence in the Nineteenth Century. This will be considered particularly in relation to regimes of racism, policing and inspection. Following a short outline of the development of forms of specula including that devised by J. Marion Sims through experimentations on enslaved women, the focus will be on the use of the speculum in connection with various laws. These were ostensibly concerned with venereal disease, sex work and the ‘fighting fitness’ of armed forces. The legislation under discussion includes regulationist regimes in France and its colonies in the 1820s and ‘30s, when sex workers were registered and forced to undergo regular examinations for signs of disease in the name of public health. Similar laws include the British Contagious Diseases Acts, first passed as An Act for the Prevention of Contagious Diseases at Certain Naval and Military Stations in 1864, and extended in 1866, and 1869 in response to concerns about the rate of venereal disease in the military. The laws and versions of them were enforced throughout the British Empire, including India, Ireland, Malta, New Zealand and in the Cape Colony. The origins, site and circulation of illness was located in women, and the effects of the laws was their curtailment in public space, and the use of forcible speculum examination to diagnose and incarcerate ‘suspect’ women. Reports from Algeria in the 1840s cited sex workers as describing the speculum as ‘the penis of the government’, and ‘the mirror of the government’. As outlined in the paper, both those phrases are highly telling in relation to the speculum and its use and users more generally in terms of histories of visuality and materiality: ‘‘the penis of the government’ is indicative of the experience by the person whose body feels and experiences the speculum at the ‘distal’ end, and ‘the mirror of the government’ indicates how it was used for visualising and governing by the user at the ‘proximal’ end, suggesting the importance of the instrument in both haptic and scopic violence.
Cristina Silvia Dogaru Enterprise of becoming: violent imaginaries of neoliberalism
Is there intrinsic violence in the logic of neoliberal optimization? In its evolution from Fordist “rationalism” to neoliberal “emotionality” capitalism seemed to have created its own ecology of powers, where subjects are in process of continuous “becoming” (through melioration techniques): “stepping out of the comfort zone” and transforming into “better”, more desirable selves – as current identities are never enough. Based on ethnographic material gathered during two fieldwork experiences (onsite in 2019 and online in 2020), with employees of two multinational corporations, this paper builds on the pattern of self-optimization as recurrent practice of “survival” and “healing” the uncertainty (of the future, of the market, or of both). Employing Brian Massumi’s concept of “affect” in conjunction with the Foucauldian notion of “pastoral power”, the research offers a series of ethnographic vignettes mirroring the recent mutations of capitalist governmentality into nourishing “pastoral subjectivities”, which are guided and protected towards “salvation”, against the forces of darkness (“uncertainty”). In the age of semio- and cognitive capitalism, the consumption of “transformative” experiences is empowering individuals to overcome a threatening future by constantly questioning status-quo and convert into better versions of themselves. Post-Fordist corporate patterns of work are thus instrumentalizing practices at the intersection of art, politics, and economy (such as workshops, trainings, team-buildings, employing theatrical and performance techniques), in order to “produce” employee experiences that serve emotional governance. With it, corporate regimes gain in “visuality” (Nicholas Mirzoeff) – the imaginary field of force validating them as part of the capitalist power apparatus.
16.30-17.30
Turning the inextricable [or, intractable] condition against itself
Yasmine Eid-SabbaghDenise Ferreira da SilvaDoreen Mende
Location: online
Moderator: Mick Wilson
“Violence is at the beginning of thinking; it is the thing of thought, of reason.” Violence is also the thing of art. This is not a dilemma. But a matrix. Violence marks the rule of law moving away from violence as an event as if it could be restituted by denouncing a name or tracing a date. Instead, the contribution wishes to problematize violence as an inextricable condition from which there is neither an escape nor an excuse nor an apology. This condition has always been formative and will inextricably continue to affect art as a concept and a practice of transcendental reason. Put differently, art is implicit as well as complicit with the rule of law (and signification) legitimizing colonial (juridical) and racial (symbolic) violence. There is an end to this only possibly at the end of art as we know it.
Before this beginning, that is, before the declaration of what thought and art is, the practices of research––the promises of the curious, the progressive, the inquisitive and exquisite, the new and advanced, the explorative, or the actual––enabled the making of the inextricable condition for art to become onto-epistemological building blocs of the architectures of museums, academies and libraries; these are the infrastructures for culturalizing and normalizing violence’s political economy of expropriation, dispossession, analysis and value-systems in the name of art.
The contribution continues a shared reflection from a conference/public meeting On Violence (it makes us think of a dance and a fête as much as of war) where Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh performativly invoked a set of digitized photographs from Burj al-Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp near Tyr, Lebanon, with the care to interrupt the vicious circle of violence when making them public in art, which has been responded by Denise Ferreira da Silva with the proposal of “Reading Art as Confrontation” in conversation with Doreen Mende in Dublin in 2014. Our participation in the 4th Biennial PARSE Research Conference would allow us to articulate a performative continuation across temporalities, memories, geographies and practices reflecting how to cope with violence as an inextricable condition in art.