Strand

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. 

While debates on Mediterranean’s regionalism are emerging as counter-discourse to European migration politics, as Fanon reminds us, the very idea of Mediterranean values is a myth of the colonizer. Following Fanon, what would it mean to refuse the Mediterranean as a “culture”, and why it is crucial today to “de-mediterraneify” the Mediterranean as discourse and  image? By drawing on the complex history of violence that defines Calabria as a strategic location on the Mediterranean sea, recounted through a series of personal anecdotes, and through the works of Fanon and Gramsci, my intervention addresses the degrees of violence that the idea of the Mediterranean culture is marked, and elaborate on what I’ve called “de-mediterraneification” in the imagination of an abolitionist future. What does it mean to refuse the prison of the “cultures of the Mediterranean” and imagine reinventing our ways of relating to other people, to ourselves, to the land? What can we learn from the bodies of water that compose the Mediterranean Sea, both at the level of how we move collectively and how we move as individuals?

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.

Contributors

A

Jumanah Abbas

Jumanah Abbas is an architect, a writer, and a curator, working through an ecology of interdisciplinarity that architecture debates, concepts and dialogues engage with. Jumanah received her master’s degree in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practice from Columbia University (2020) and her undergraduate degree in Architecture from American University of Sharjah (2018). Jumanah is collaborating with international institutes, regional organizations, and universities, one is “Mapping Memories of Resistance: The Untold Story of the Occupation of the Golan Heights” project in collaboration with London School of Economics, Birzeit University, and Al Marsad, Arab Human Rights Center in Golan Heights. The other is the upcoming 2024 Quadrennial project, in collaboration with Qatar Museums, which is establishing points of local histories and artistic relevance in relation to global movements and histories.

More

Rodrigo Azaola

My work is an ongoing research on the intersection of art, historical narratives and international relations. Among my recent projects are SIB’s, École Supérieure d’Art et de Design d’Orléans (2020); Armida, C3 Contemporary, Melbourne (2019); A little better, Airspace Projects, Sydney (2018); Phantom Pain, SIART La Paz Biennial (2016); etc. I’m a founder member of the H. Committee of Human Vindication, an arts collective that operated as a universal pseudo-organization founded in 1947, and Modelab, an artistic initiative that explores public space with recent projects held at Les Traversées du Marais Festival, Paris (2019); Taipei Artist Village, Taipei (2019); Manila Biennale, Philippines (2018), etc.

More

B

Catherine Baker

Catherine Baker is Senior Lecturer in 20th Century History at the University of Hull. She specialises in the relationship between nationalism, militarism and popular culture through work that bridges post-Cold-War history, international relations and cultural studies, applying feminist, postcolonial and queer perspectives. Her most recent books are Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-Conflict, Postcolonial? (2018) and the edited volume Making War on Bodies: Militarisation, Aesthetics and Embodiment in International Politics (2020). Her articles have appeared in International Feminist Journal of Politics, European Journal of International Relations and elsewhere.

More

Lou Barzaghi

Lou Barzaghi has a bachelors degree in Architecture and Urban Planning (FAUUSP), when Ze researched Francis Alÿs and the possibilities for creating in the contemporary Metropolis. Ze is a master in Clinical Psychology (Subjectivities Studies – PUCSP), with the thesis Mapa Teatro: barbaric perspectives on Violence, and a PhD Candidate in the History department of Architecture and Urban Planning School of Campinas University. Hir research focuses are Violence, Performance and Urban Planning in Latin America.

More

Federica Bueti

Federica Bueti writes, edits, teaches, and occasionally curates exhibitions. Her research focuses on refusals and decolonial feminist critical poetics. She is the founder of …ment, a journal for contemporary culture, art, and politics, which she ran between 2011 and 2015. She is the editor of Move…ment. On Forms of Protest and Resistance, published by Book Works, London, (2013); The Incantation of the Disquieting Muse: On Divinity, Supra-Realities, or the Exorcisement of Witchery published by The Greenbox and SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, (2017).  For SAVVY Contemporary, she edited the volumes Whose Land Have I Lit On Now? Reflections on the notion of Hostipitality, (with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Elena Agudio) published by Archive Books, Berlin, (2021); We Have Delivered Ourselves from the Tonal. Of, With, Towards, On Julius Eastman (with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Antonia Alampi) published by Archive Books (2021). With Markus Miessen, she is the editor of Cultures of Assembly published by Sternberg/MIT Press, (upcoming, 2021).  In 2019, she co-curated the exhibition and research project “Ecologies of Darkness. Building Ground on Shifting Sand” at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2019 (project funded by KSB). She is the Italian translator of a book of poetry by artist Tiziana La Melia, upcoming with Archive Books, (2021), and currently working on a collection of essays by Calabrian cultural anthropologist Vito Teti. Her book, Critical Poetics of Feminist Refusals: Voicing Dissent Across Differences is forthcoming with Routledge (2022).

She serves as board member of the Work Field Commission of the MA in Artistic Research at The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. She has taught at The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague; Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, a.o. and regularly gives workshops, and mentors art students and curators. Bueti has written on art and social theory for international art magazines such as Ocula, BOMB, frieze magazine as well as critical anthologies and artist monographs. Bueti is a recipient of Turn2, research residency at The Bag Factory (Johannesburg).She has been a fellow of The School of Infinite Rehearsal (Onassis AiR), Athens; and Writer-in- residence at Hordaland Art Centre, Bergen, NO (2015) and at Florida Art Centre, Miami, FL (2016). She earned a BA in Cultural and Media Studies (2004), an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies (2007), both from the University of Milan, and a PhD from The Royal College of Art. Born in 1982 in Scilla, Reggio Calabria, she lives and works between Berlin and Scilla.

More

D

Sharon Daniel

Sharon Daniel is a media artist who creates interactive and participatory documentary artworks addressing issues of social, racial, and environmental injustice, focusing principally on mass incarceration and the criminal legal system. She develops innovative online interfaces and multi-media installations that visualize and materialize the testimony of incarcerated people. Her work has been exhibited in museums and festivals internationally. Her work has been honored by the Webby Awards, a Rockefeller/Tribeca Film Festival New Media Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. She was named in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts “YBCA 100” – a list of “the creative minds, makers, and pioneers that are asking the questions and making the provocations that will shape the future of American culture.” Daniel is a Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Documentation of exhibitions and links to projects can be found at http://sharondaniel.net.

More

Angeliki Dimaki-Adolfsen

Angeliki Dimaki-Adolfsen is a Greek-Norwegian designer and PhD-fellow at the Academy of Art and Design, at University of Gothenburg. Through her project Border play(spaces), she investigates the spatial and temporal aspects of playspaces, through the lens of design in the Greek borderlines. Angeliki gained her BA in Interior Architecture and Design from the Technological Institute of Athens. She holds a MA in Design from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in 2010 where she has been residing since then.

More

Cristina Silvia Dogaru

A crossbreed between Anthropology and Visual Cultural Studies, with a consistent background in Communication. After more than 10 years in Advertising, Cristina Dogaru took a twist to Academia with a thesis in Visual Anthropology on the “architectures of mind in corporate environments” at Aarhus University (Denmark). She is now preparing a dissertation on the “unsettling bodies of the Posthuman” at CESI – Center of Excellence in the Study of Image, University of Bucharest (Romania). Meanwhile, she is studying Everyday Aesthetics at Sapienza University in Rome (Italy) within the CIVIS mobility programme. Her research interests span biopolitics, organizational anthropology, imaginaries of the Posthuman, digital media cultures and performance studies.

More

E

Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh

Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh studied history, photography, and visual anthropology in Paris. From 2006 to 2011, she lived in Burj al-Shamali, a refugee camp next to Sour, Lebanon where she carried out photographic research that includes a dialogical project with a group of young Palestinians, as well as archival work on family and studio photographs. Since 2008, Eid-Sabbagh has been a member of the Arab Image Foundation (www.fai.org.lb). She has been a doctoral candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna since 2011. Lecture at The persistance of images, EHESS, Paris, and intervention with Necessità dei volti at Le Bal, Paris, October 2013. Performance at On Violence, Symposium of the Limerick Biennial, Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin, March 2014. Artist in Residency at the Palestinian Museum, Ramallah/Birzeit, Palestine, August-November 2014. Performance at Archives Power Society, University of Fine Arts Braunschweig, Germany, February 2015

More

G

Lisa Godson

Dr. Lisa Godson researches, teaches and writes about architecture, material culture and art. Her books include Modern Religious Architecture in Germany, Ireland and BeyondUniform: Clothing and Discipline in the Modern World; Making 1916: Visual and Material Culture of the Easter Rising and The Secret Lives of Objects. Recent publications include ‘Self-Determination and Usable Pasts, 1922 and 2022’ in Art and Self-Determination: a Reader (2023) and ‘Bodily-Material Culture Techniques in the Spaces of the Devotional Revolution’ in Journal of Victorian Culture (2023).

Godson’s collaborations includes the award-winning feature documentary Build Something Modern with Still Films, based on her research into modernist architecture in West Africa and as research consultant to: the Irish Museum of Modern Art for the exhibition Self-Determination: a Global Perspective (2023-4), the Victoria & Albert Museum for the design history of the vaginal speculum (2021), the artist Eimear Walsh for ‘Romantic Ireland’ at the Venice Biennale (2024) and the artist Jesse Jones for ‘Tremble Tremble’ at the Venice Biennale (2017).

Godson is currently Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Trinity College Dublin while writing a critical material history of the site of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, on sabbatical from her role as Programme Leader of the MA in Design History and Material Culture at the National College of Art and Design.

More

H

Ola Hassanain

Ola Hassanain trained her focus on the subtle politics of space—namely, how built spaces react to and reinforce violence from state entities, which in turn, creates a built environment that reflects, responds to, regulates the lives of those who inhabit it. Her most recent work explores an idea of “space as discourse,” an expanded notion of space that encompasses political and environmental questions. Her work tries to develop a spatial vocabulary that follows how ruptures presented by ‘political events’, make it possible to aspire to new kinds of ecologies. Ola’s development of critical spatial practice is party informed by her post-academic training which includes an ongoing Ph.D. in Practice candidacy at the Academy of Fine Art, a BAK fellowship 2017-2018, and teaching in HKU University of the Arts Utrecht and Sandberg Institute amongst others.

More

L

Carl Johan Erikson & Björn Larsson

Throughout their respective art careers, Björn Larsson and Carl Johan Erikson have, in a large number of artistic projects, generated alternative narratives and artistic statements on Swedish contemporary history. They have both conducted representative documentary projects spanning long periods, where the ongoing work has been conditional on gathering visual documentation. “Direct award contracts for a short film about medical age assessment” is part of the artistic research project Refuse to Kill – stories of the conscientious objectors funded by the Swedish Research Council. The project in ongoing since 2013 and have resulted in several publications as well as national and international presentations and exhibitions. https://vagradoda.se

More

Patricia Lorenzoni

Patricia Lorenzoni holds a Ph.D. in History of Ideas from the University of Gothenburg, and is currently a research fellow at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism, Uppsala University. She is also active as an essayist, translator and occasionally a filmmaker. Her recent publications include Dagbok från Brasilien: Fascismen inifrån och utifrån (Journal from Brazil: Fascism from within and without, Glänta Produktion 2020) and the sequence of poems Hotel Nacional (Ars Interpres Publications 2020). Her work can be followed on http://www.patricia-lorenzoni.com/.

More

M

Ivana Mancic

Ivana Mancic is a PhD student in Fine Art, School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University, UK. The research she is undergoing in its focus has art practice and it is aimed at the production of photographs the purpose of which is to display the personal narrative and address the issues of war, loss and belonging, related to the specificity of the ex-Yugoslav context in order to contribute to developing of the female voice of artists and pacifists in contemporary art.

More

Laura McAtackney

Dr Laura McAtackney is an Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark and a Docent in Contemporary Historical Archaeology at the University of Oulu in Finland. Her research uses contemporary archaeology and critical heritage approaches to explore social justice issues, including long-term studies on political imprisonment in Ireland (Long Kesh / Maze prison and Kilmainham Gaol) and post-conflict Northern Ireland (especially materialized segregation), gendered perspectives on the past and the experiences and memory of the colonial Caribbean. She is currently the PI for an Independent Research Fund Denmark Project Enduring Materialities of Colonialism: temporality, spatiality and memory on St Croix, USVI (EMoC) (2019-2024), a Co-I on ARCHAEOBALT (2018-2022), an EU-Interreg project on archaeological tourism and is part of the OPEN HEART CITY collective working with Magdalene Laundries in Ireland.

More

Doreen Mende

Doreen Mende is curator, theorist, researcher and currently professor for Curatorial Politics and head of the CCC Research-based Master and PhD-Forum at HEAD Genève/Switzerland. Recent curatorial projects include “Hamhung’s Two Orphans” for Bauhaus Imaginista at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, 2018; “The Prisoner Letter” at Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Sharjah Biennial 13 Offsite in Ramallah, 2017. Mende is currently working on the curatorial research study “The Missed Seminar: Worldmaking After Internationalism” in the framework of https://entangledinternationalism.org (#184864, Swiss National Science Foundation). Since 2015 she has been a founding member of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin.
More

Eleni Michaelidi

Eleni Michaelidi (b. 1983, Athens) is a contemporary art historian, editor, and curator. She studied archaeology and art history in Athens, Berlin, and holds an MA Diploma in media art histories. She has previously worked for the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Snehta Residency, and the Bergen Assembly, and was Curator in Residence at the Salzburger Kunstverein (2018). Her research interests focus on experimental time-based media, histories of the exhibition form, and the concept of urgency in contemporary art. Eleni is currently Research Fellow of the project post documenta: contemporary arts as territorial agencies, a collaboration between the Athens School of Fine Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. She lives and works in between Athens and Berlin.

More

P

Evie Papada

Dr. Evie Papada is a human geographer based at the University of St Andrews, UK. Her research interests intersect border studies, asylum seeking and the digitialisation of law enforcement. She has previously worked as a policy adviser within international human rights organisations. She is the co-author of ‘New Borders: Hotspots and the European Migration Regime’.

More

Amin Parsa

Amin Parsa currently works as a lecturer at the Sociology of Law Department at Lund University (LU). Amin holds a doctoral degree in Public International Law from Faculty of Law at LU. His research interest includes: Politics of international law, law and technology, law and materiality, laws of warfare and law and politics of mobility control.

More

S

Denise Ferreira da Silva

The artist and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva is a full professor at the Institute of Social Justice at University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), adjunct professor at the Monash University School of Art, Architecture, and Design (Melbourne, Australia). She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), The Impagavel Divide (Workshop of Political Imagination and Living Commons, 2019) and Unpayable Debt (Stenberg / MIT Press, 2022). Her artwork includes the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018) and Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020) in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational artistic practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has performed shows and lectures in the Pompidou Centre (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), MASP (São Paulo), Guggenheim (New York) and MoMa (New York). She also wrote for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016, Venice Biennale, 2017 and Documenta 14) and published in art spaces such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst and E-Flux.

More