In Comuna Under Construction, Ressler and Azzellini have bypassed the cult of Chavez in order to look at the grassroots facets of the movement. Across Venezuela, activists have established thousands of Consejos Comunales (community councils) where citizens discuss local concerns and seek solutions to common problems; these councils in turn can combine to form the ‘Comunas’ of the film’s title. Jaquelin Ávila is one such activist. In the film, we follow her as she sets about establishing a new commune in a barrio on the outskirts of Caracas. The locals want a sewerage system that works, legal recognition of their property and connection to the internet. The process of achieving these targets is evidently a mix of advocacy and ad-hoc experimentation: Ávila tells one local man, ‘if you are willing to work then I will support you’, and reassures an assembled group that they also have the support of a neighbouring Consejo Comunal called Emiliano Hernández, which has been established for three years. Ávila proudly talks about the drains they have already installed there, the walls to prevent landslides and the replacement of mud huts with well-built brick houses.

Most of the action feels entirely spontaneous. Indeed, Ressler has edited his film with only the lightest of touches – primarily selecting material from hundreds of hours of footage. Shots are long, and filmed using a roaming camera. There are moments, however, when the viewer might suspect that we’re not getting a neutral impression of real, unmediated life. For example, when Ressler and Azzellini’s cameraman enters the recently completed home of one of the residents of Emiliano Hernández, the situation smacks of propaganda: owner Miriam Colmenares praises God for Chavez and talks about how happy she is with her lot. The disruptive logic of the documentary process is even more obvious in another section of the film: the filmmakers decide to travel into the countryside to visit a rural commune; the Emiliano Hernández commune gets wind of this and sends a delegate to travel with the filmmakers to establish trading and bartering ties with the ‘peasant’ group. Nevertheless, Ressler and Azzellini do not tarry on such points. Their concern is rather with enabling subjects to vocalise directly to the camera – there are no postproduction voice-overs, for example – and the filmmakers shrink from view not as an unseen controlling presence but simply in order to allow the Venezuelans to speak for themselves.

Comuna Under Construction is composed of three sections: two in the city and one in the countryside. In the latter, we see a group discuss how the ‘revolutionary’ socialist changes will allow them to escape the yoke of peasantry, resist the power of international corporations and bypass middlemen. One concern is the relationship to the state: one speaker says, ‘we are autonomous although we support the process and the president’; another states that ‘the president says that we farmers are no longer peasants but also citizens’. Chavez said much the same thing in 2007: ‘This is society, the people, taking power over the state. Power for the people … The people’s time has come.’ But the reality is that the state had authorized this power; indeed the process is far from a bloody revolution in the classic Bolshevik sense. An insight into this wider judicial framework appears in Iain Bruce’s book The Real Venezuela, 2008:

‘The concentration of land ownership was a curse from Venezuela’s history. The big landholdings, or latifundios, had to be done away with. But there was no need for any expropriation, President Chavez insisted, much less confiscation. The Land Law introduced in 2001 provided for a punitive tax on idle property, which would encourage big owners to hand over their surplus land to peasant cooperatives.’

In the more militant commune in Petare, a city in the northwest of the sprawling Caracas urban area, the debate revolves around a general sense of disillusion with the bureaucracy of the state and with the abovementioned concessions to big business. The first speaker talks about how ‘we are losing our credibility because of the incompetence of state institutions’. She tells listeners how the government body in charge of the communes has been restructured several times, creating an administrative nightmare and severe delays for grassroots workers (it is not simply the commune’s ‘credibility’ that is at stake, but also the welfare and improvement of the barrios’ most impoverished homes). She rails against the minister in charge, and threatens to call a press conference in order to appeal to the Venezuelan people and, of course, to Chavez himself. These moments reveal the core concern of both the commune movement and Ressler and Azzellini’s film: the tension between constituent power and the state authority that authorises it, between the mobility of small groups and the lumbering apparatus of the state. The question here is: how can a centralised bureaucracy and multitude of decentralised communes flourish together? The question of whether they can co-operate at all has already been answered in the affirmative.

Comuna Under Construction was screened on 22 September as part of the ‘Make Film Politically’ season at the ICA, London.

Colin Perry is a writer and critic based in London.

From: Art Monthly, Dec-Jan 10-11

Some two decades later, in 2003, Oliver Ressler begun with an exhibition in Ljubljana his traveling series of installations and public space interventions called Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies.[2] By then, the main point of such artistic work had arguably become to counter the reinstalled “sacred cow” (to use Beuys’s words), the monologic law of the marketplace.

The context was different: the Cold War ended, Capitalism had won, and the socialist bloc had fallen. The general acceptance of the TINA doctrine (There-Is-No-Alternative) after the fall of the socialist bloc was arguably unprecedented in the entire history of capitalism, and it would hard to find a comparable historical moment when capitalism has been associated with “democracy” to such an extent. Moreover, the Third Way had become a reality, albeit twisted, radically different from Beuys’s aspirations. The “third way” and its main collective subject, the “civil society” (identified with anticommunist dissidents) had been instrumental in the demise of real socialism, but did not bring much liberation or emancipation. On the contrary, in the former socialist bloc, the civil society contributed to the ideological enclosure of postcommunism, especially through the new discourse of naturalization in which “‘natural’ society is pitted against the ‘unnatural’ impositions of the State.”[3] Here, while the State is taken to account for authoritarianism and identified with “Power”, civil society appears as the natural environment for “Democracy”. However, this latter image is a fiction, since the actual history of the formalization of civil societies in the former socialist bloc does not show a more “organic” representation of society, but on the contrary, a gradual limitation of the multitude of spontaneous social movements which emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s, into a restricted and rather elitist group of non-governmental organizations and leaders. Thus, in the cultural history of transition, the opposition between the state and civil society can be understood as the first enclosure of the postcommunist public sphere, which contributed to the elimination of informal social movements and independent cultural scenes from the field of visibility of the public sphere. All its good deeds notwithstanding, the formal civil society naturalized capitalocentrism (“free market” centrism) and eurocentrism (the epistemic privilege of the Western experience) in the former socialist bloc, in the postcommunist transition, by thematizing them as organic and practical principles needed for a “return to normality” after the “communist deviation”. The local colonization of these dominant cultural ideologies of transition happened in the discourse of the civil society in an even more obvious fashion than in the discourse of state apparatuses. The very concept of the “civil society”, as in the often-used expression “global civil society”, appeared to describe a “universal stage of development,” which was, however, de facto represented, sponsored and consolidated in an epistemic and materialist manner solely by the West. The resulting formalized civil society has become effectively a “third way”, opposed both to the “corrupted” formal political sphere and to the misgivings of the “ignorant” and disorganized masses. Namely, this “third way” separated a Western-minded spiritual elite in the local social body, one that claimed the post-1989 remade public space (and not the formal political sphere). Through its essential reliance on elite intellectuals and professional experts, the postcommunist civil society contributed thus to the elimination of the worker and of the common man from the postcommunist public spaces.

The cultural history of postcommunist transitions shows even the re-creation of a geopolitical reality based on the utopian “third way”: the value-region of “Central Europe”. Ralf Dahrendorf – who uncoincidentally talked about “postcapitalism” – already wrote a history of “Central-East Europe” in the very early 1990s. A geopolitical identity promoted by prominent dissidents and intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik, Central Europe (Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary) arguably represented an attempt to get closer to the West by getting rid of the “Eastern” attribute of the former socialist bloc during the Cold War. “Central Europe” identified, as it were, the “West” within the former socialist bloc, the more European populations, who were now returning to their “natural” place of belonging (the western Free World), after the fall of the artificial Iron Curtain. The idea of “Central Europe” – quickly adopted also in the western part of Romania – was cutting thus through the body of the former socialist “bloc” a new symbolical oriental difference which defined a new regional identity: European. Corroborated with the stages of integration of the various states from the former socialist bloc into the political structures of Europe, the postcommunist transition gave thus a new material and physical reality to the fundamental Eurocentric myth that all non-europeans can be considered pre-europeans. Put it shortly, contrary to the visions of artists, theorists and militant people, the Third Way emerged in postcommunism as a foundation for the local colonization of dominant ideologies of the modern world in longue durée. The Third Way did allow the development of political differences spanning a wide range between social-democracy, liberalism and neoconservatism. However, the centered liberalism of the Third Way did not allow, in the process of restructuring the postcommunist public spheres of the former socialist bloc, any investment in epistemic dignity given to alternatives to capitalism or to the Western modernity.

2. In between the two different sets of artistic gestures, separated by just about two decades, the task of the radical artist aspiring for social change seems to have shifted from the work of “consolidation” alluded by Beuys, to the work of evidence. The project Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies moved in a sense horizon that resisted but had to acknowledge the general domination of the word of order There-Is-No-Alternative. At the time, it may have seemed a wonder that the artist was able at all to put together such a rich panoply of non-capitalist and in the same time “non-communist” visions of economy and society. The exhibition offered the vision of a positive anti-capitalist episteme that had nothing to do with nostalgia, being rooted in a present with a concrete vision of the future. In the same time, it was obvious that the artist had to show more than one alternative. The postcommunist alternative economy and society had to be neither Capitalist, nor Communist, but a “Third Way” that multiplies itself into a multitude of thirdings. The alternative to the totality of capitalism and totalitarianism of communism had to be non-totalizing, non-essentialist, non-monologic.

However, in spite of the undeniable joys of inhabiting a plural reality, the project also evidenced a certain uneasiness deriving from its principled double rejection of totality. It was as if, in the condition of the disappearance from reality of the imperfect other-world of actual existing socialism, Oliver Ressler, the artist, had to prove the actual existence of a whole other-world, with visions and practices different to each other, yet radically differing in their togetherness from the monologic global grip of capitalism. The artist was in a paradoxical position: he worked within a new dialectical process that had overcome in its internal pluralistic logic the presupposition of the idea of totality, but which related nevertheless to capitalism as an existent totality. The work also emphasized the tendency of art to become an internalizing world in itself precisely when it actually manages to challenge the limits of capitalism. In this sense, it speaks to Brian Holmes’ recent argument that the “world of contemporary art” has not surmounted what Marx calls “alienation” (namely, the severing of a social relation), in spite of the number of brilliant works focusing in the last decades on the externalist problems of artistic products, relations and labor.[4]

Oliver Ressler succeeded in visualizing the complex alternative to capitalism with the help of no-less than sixteen video testimonies.[5] It is important that in his work the difference of non-capitalism keeps on becoming itself subject to difference, unfolding in a manifold of independent alternatives. In the experience of the exhibition, non-capitalism makes a difference firstly in relation to non-capitalism. The political gesture and most of the effort and creative capability of the artist seem also to be invested in the internal differentiation of the alternative world: a non-totalized immanence that unfolds many irreducible possibilities and realities. Upon entering the space of the installation, the visitor actually walks on the path of non-capitalist alternatives, via stepping on significant quotations laid across the floor of the exhibition like crisscrossing paths towards or from the testimony videos. The printed strips create the powerful image of a non-centralized structure which sustains the testimonies: another possible world. The work operates thus simultaneously at two levels, emphasizing the dramatic condition of the artist in postcommunism: art is not only a vehicle for social change (the expression of alternatives to capitalism), but the artist has the gigantic task to create also the context in which it is possible at all to articulate a general critique. And this is what makes it a work of art. What is more, the frame itself tends to be discursive, and becomes part of the work of art.

However, the more sense Alternative Economies makes as an alternative, the greater the relevance of Marx’s early observation: “Will the theoretical needs be immediate practical needs? It is not enough for thought to strive for realization, reality itself must strive towards thought.”[6]

3. The reality that ominously strives towards these important artworks is capitalism. As different as these subjective approaches may be, they have something in common at the epistemic level: the objective reality of the hegemony or domination of capitalism. The works point out that non-capitalist difference is real, rich and plural, but also that non-capitalist difference fails to open a world without capitalism. If I were to generalize and adapt in this context Luhmann’s concepts of first-order and second-order observation, one could argue that in the world of the “postcommunist condition”, the non-capitalist difference has kept on operating primarily on itself, captured, as it were, in a transition from first-order to second-order difference, that is, in a state of relative abstraction.

One can advance the hypothesis that the historical event of the fall of the socialist bloc, and the theoretical event of the postmodern caution against political totalitarianism and/or metaphysical essentialism are correlated. In other words, the “fear of totalisation” that characterized for the most part the affectivity of recent radical politics, critical philosophy and artistic practices, comes together in the rejection of totality as a synthetic conceptual tool. In other words, a new imperative has been at work in critical theory in the decades immediately preceding and following the fall of the socialist bloc: the alternatives to capitalism must not constitute together a totality, neither theoretically, nor historically – and much less politically. Paradoxically, the world of non-capitalist alternatives has to have no systemic unity, but is haunted by the implacable totality of capitalism, which at its turn is driven by the objective reality of capitalism as a global form of power. Consequently, alternative economies constitute a wounded immanence, a squandering realm of abundance, somewhat akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s cancerous body without organs – in a productive sense. This imperative undermines the mutual consolidation of differences (which would make possible a historical event), as well as the theoretical work at starting abstractions (which would make possible the embodiment of a real epistemic turn as condition for political change).

Political resistance needs to be premised on epistemic resistance, and Oliver Ressler’s work brings a great contribution to the necessary identification of non-hegemonic forms of knowledge and non-hegemonic forms of value production and exchange. The work also emphasizes the hyper-modern condition of postcommunism: not the lack of “class consciousness” (related to a supposed disappearance of the worker), but too much of it. Namely, a consciousness of resistance which is so self-conscious, that it never takes a break from work, focusing incessantly, to the point of exhaustion, on its own legitimation. And exhaustion to death, both physical and cognitive, has been a hallmark of the history of capitalism, which always depended on the cruel exploitation of wage labor as well as on the crueler exploitation of non-waged forms of labor. Namely – and with this we move on to explore the epistemic field opened by posing the problem of alternatives to capitalism – capitalism is not a historical form of organizing the global economy that tends to reduce all forms of labor to the wage-capital relationship. On the contrary, from its inception in the 16th century with the conquest of the Americas and the Atlantic trade, Western capitalism emerged as a form of global power that works by integrating completely different forms of labor, separated mainly by colonial and gender differences: waged labor, as well as non-waged labor (slavery, serfdom, housework, reciprocity etc). In other words, capitalism integrates accumulation with starvation, democracy with tyranny, free market with military intervention, debate with silencing, etc. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos put it, a society is not capitalist because all the social and economical relations are capitalist, but because the capitalist relations are determining how the economical and social relations existing in society work. Actually, some liberal thinkers also agree to this point, ever since Joseph Stiglitz pointed out that the free market works with a regime of non-transparent information.[7] Stiglitz’s “discovery” that the “free market” is “based on informational asymmetry” arguably brought the discipline of economics back into the traditionally Marxist perspective of “political economy.”[8] The main moral of Stiglitz’s “discovery” is that the invisible hand does not lead to an efficient allocation of resources. Consequently, there is no market equilibrium without external intervention, be it governmental or military. One could also recall Niklas Luhmann’s argument that what connects two “working” complex systems is a loose coupling, for if it would be a strong coupling, the respective systems would be in danger of collapsing one another. Similarly, non-capitalist forms of organizing power, labor and production are able to develop a loose autonomy all while existing and thriving, to “a reasonable degree”, under the capitalist form of global power.

Capitalocentrism, one of the dominant ideologies of postcommunism,[9] is a totalization that does not operate only by reduction (that is: through the tendential transformation of difference into sameness), but by producing and organizing enclosures of non-capitalist sectors which are given a loose autonomy. At a larger scale, capitalism centers all the previous forms of value production and labor around the wage-capital relationship and money-form, but it does not eliminate unpaid labor or non-capitalist forms of exchange. On the contrary, it keeps on creating such spaces of unpaid labor, more often delineated through colonial difference or gender difference: household labor, sweatshops, immigrant labor, forced labor have been and still are vital for the growth of global capitalism. Similarly, capitalist power did not operate in the postcommunist transition only through the negative force of violence and repression, but through the productive colonization of the spheres of social life and the colonization of the inner lifeworld. If real socialism itself allowed and actually fostered the formation of enclaves of bourgeois life (such as the institution of the nuclear family as a result of mass urbanization), but provided a horizon for the invention of non-bourgeois and non-capitalist forms of social life, the postcommunist transition of the former socialist bloc put all the processes of social exchange and value production under pressure to revolve around capital, even if this meant enforcing the non-capitalist character of certain enclaves. Acknowledging this has radical consequences for any theory of anticapitalist resistance. Without going here into detail, one can point out a number of “negative” elements organizing the capitalocentric postcommunist transition. These are reductive elements that are fostering traditional forms of resistance against capitalism: primitive accumulation (“strategic investors”, racketeering, pawnshops, the explosion of theft and murder in the former socialist bloc after 1989), the relentless neoliberal attack on health and education (i.e. the double-edged attack on the biological and cognitive human capital), the privatization of the commons, the uprooting of the labor force and many other harmful systemic phenomena. However, one could also point to “positive” enclosures of capitalist power in the postcommunist transition. Such enclosures have an essentially productive and non-reductive character, a harm against which is harder to develop alternatives and resistance, because they depend on fostering resistance to a reasonable degree: the creation of culture industries and institutions modeled explicitly after Western models, the expansion of public spaces, the dissemination of a positive affect for commodity fetishism and instant gratification, and more importantly the production of a new “civilized” local subject, who adheres self-willingly to “European” or “Western” behaviour and lifestyle, sometimes even when protesting against capitalism.

If the sense of the postcommunist transition is the top-to-bottom integration of Eastern governmentality into the order of Western governmentality,[10] the condition of postcommunism is such that the controlled proliferation of non-capitalist difference (including progressive alternative visions, but also fascist nationalism) is an essential part in the process of integration of the former socialist bloc into the system of global capitalism. If capitalism has never been a totality that operates only through reduction, but a “mode of production” in the sense of a power that grows through fragmentation, destruction and exhaustion, but also through the organization of relationships, then the image of capitalism as a purely negative power is itself a fetish of capitalism. As Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano has repeatedly emphasized, capitalism is a form of global power that has traditionally and systematically integrated non-capital-based forms of labor control. This also means that the implacable totality of capitalism cannot “completely and homogeneously disappear from the scene of history in order to be replaced by any equivalent.”[11] Consequently, the radical thinking of alternatives to capitalism depends on the development of an epistemic space of alternatives that identifies tactics of resistance in co-existence with capitalism as the basis of anti-capitalist politics.[12]

One can refer to Pavel Braila’s video Homesick Cuisine (2006),[13] the work of an artist who did not study Fine Arts, starting from the margins of arts as an amateur photographer. In Homesick Cuisine, the traditional dishes of sarmale and placinte are cooked by the artist’s parents and sent from Chisinau to Berlin in a raffia bag through the Eurolines bus – both staples of the Romanian and Moldovan postcommunist west-bound migration experience. Here, capitalism does not disappear, but becomes witness in a corner, unveiling the invisible side of the iceberg: a flourishing system of exchange following and yet escaping the legal routes of capitalist trade and the flows of labor force. The mass phenomenon of postcommunist immigration evidences a developing double-consciousness that challenges the hegemony of nation-state and any pure imaginaries of nationhood precisely as it is tempted to identify with symbols of nationalism and/or Europe. The reality that strives towards the thought of sarmale in Berlin is that of a gigantic chain of systems of exchange, based on human capital, not money, but in co-existence with capitalism and assimilation. However, one does not need the East European immigrant experience to show such alternative networks: one can point to the postcommunist (i.e. post-1989) emergence of Mitfahrzentrale and Mitfahrgelegenheit, after 1997 as institutionalized forms of cooperative economy in capitalist Germany, of the remarkable Clubture, a network of participatory exchange in the cultural sector in Croatia,[14] and to a host of other independent cultural groups and cooperatives. It is not hard to find such examples spread all throughout the current capitalist world. They all are under the pressure of enclavization, but they proliferate.

What is more, alternative economies and tactics of resistance in co-existence can be identified in a systemic (but not systematic) manner precisely in the recent experience of real socialism. To paraphrase Fidel Castro, the biggest error was to believe somebody knew what socialism was,[15] especially from a leftist perspective. Maybe the most important contribution of real socialism to this world has been the proliferating alternative universe of other-economies: informal speculative markets (bazaar, black market, video market etc.), sustainable food and self-sufficient living systems, friendship economies, long-term savings and investments (house building and reparation, etc.), zero-interest borrowings, workplace solidarity, barter economies, collectible values, gift economies, gypsy banks, and the list goes on. Considered in their own field of immanence, this multitude of alternative forms cannot be reduced to an “informal capitalist market” or “survival economy”, because the value of their transactions is based on community as capital, even when money is circulated, and on a general subordination of economy to social life. However, the epistemic wealth and political value of such experiences has been made invisible by the dominant postcommunist ideologies of anticommunism, eurocentrism and capitalocentrism, which marked both the left and right political thought. The integration of the former socialist bloc into the capitalist world has both annihilated (as a social practice and cultural memory) and recuperated (in a commodified form) such popular economic practices of real socialism. The generalized rhetoric of the “sacrificed generation” and the willingness to lose lives evidenced by the implementation of “shock therapy” and “lustration” policies are just the most obvious signs of the postcommunist rush to destroy the cultural memory of real socialism. This elitist anathemization of the past has left people with no other history than the postcommunist transition (which includes the museum of anticommunism) and with no other cultural life than the television and the newly formed culture industry.[16] However, the work towards an epistemic transformation beyond capitalism can only start from actual historical experiences, not from zero, and neither from the museal workings of the anticommunist industry: only by considering the real lives and stories of people as a relevant site of experience, and by focusing on the ongoing processes of overcoding, totalization and resistance. The bottom line is that underneath state capitalism or distributive consumerism, and in explicit resistance against these arts of governing, the recent historical experience of real socialism abounds in modes of producing non-capitalist value, and especially in acts of resistance without infrastructure.[17]

In spite of being a time of permanent and normalized crisis, the postcommunist transition unfolded in an increasingly monologic and linear way, subsuming people, institutions and spheres of social life to the implacable totality of capitalism as a form of global power that was arbitrarily identified with “democracy” and the “free world.” In order to foster positive resistance against this form of power, the vision of alternative economics, understood here as the open-ended opposition to the great limit of the modern life (capitalism as a global system of enclosures), has to be liberated first from the dominant axes of anticommunism, eurocentrism and capitalocentrism, and, on a larger geographical scale, from the modern/colonial frame of rationality that created in the first place the idea of the impossibility of co-existence of capitalism and non-capitalism. The ideology of There-Is-No-Alternative (TINA) is based on the postulation of the impossibility of co-existence, which makes capitalism an implacable totality towering over the vision of its own demise. The non-capitalist alternative can become real only by contesting paradoxically this postulate, while acknowledging the actual historical experience as a valid point of departure. Only then, capitalism stops being an incommensurable totality, only then size and materiality can be finally added to the equation, in order to show the capitalist economy as a finite form in the universe of daily economical transactions. The vital process of democratic de-capitalization can start with the vision of global capitalism as a still existent reality, but finite in scale, means, geography and power. In this sense, the powerful TINA itself (a reality completely committed to the capitalist turn), quickly reveals itself to be a reality that hangs by such a thin thread that the smallest event can turn it around or dismantle it. The historical experience of real socialism provided such an event, however not as much in the arts of governing, as in the historical experience of people. One can make a difference to capitalism simply by seriously considering capitalism as something co-existent – a radical gesture which was the most popular epistemic assumption of real socialism.

• [1] Joseph Beuys, “Appeal For An Alternative”, Centerfold magazine, Toronto August/September 1979, translated by R.C.Hay and B. Kleer. Originally published as “Aufruf zur Alternative”, in Frankfurter Rundschau, December 23, 1978.
• [2] Oliver Ressler, “Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies”, Galeria Skuc, Ljubljana 20.10-23.11.2003. For an overview of the realization of the installation in different exhibitions between 2003-2007, see www.ressler.at.
• [3] See Julie Hemment, “Colonization of Liberation? The Paradox of NGOs in Postsocialist States”, The Anthropology of East Europe Review 16(1), 1998, pp.31-39.
• [4] See Brian Holmes, Unleashing the Collective Phantoms. Essays in Reverse Engineering, New York: Autonomedia 2008, 150.
• [5] The installation brings to evidence historical alternatives (such as the Zapatista Good Government, Yugoslavian self-management, workers’ collectives during the Spanish Civil War, the Paris Commune), alternative models (such as Michael Albert’s Parecon, Heinz Dieterich’s Socialism of the 21st Century, Chaia Heller’s Libertarian Municipalism, or Maria Mies’ ecological society from the subsistence perspective), and alternative guiding principles (such as Christoph Spehr’s free cooperation or Nancy Folbre’s caring labor).
• [6] See Karl Marx, Introduction, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843).
• [7] The recurrence of visual metaphors in the rhetorics of the “free market” is not accidental. Susan Buck-Morss has argued that the emergence of classical political economy – in particular Adam Smith’s founding myth of the “hidden hand” of the marketplace – was accompanied by the visual representation of the way in which the unhindered flow of commodities could generate social order and material comfort. The archetypal example is the “supply-demand curve” of neo-classical economics, which seemed to indicate the presence of timeless laws of market forces that, in turn, vouchsafed eternal human progress. Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, “Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display”, in Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen (eds.), Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances, Seattle: Bay Press, 1995, 111-141.
• [8] See Joseph Stiglitz, “Information and the Change in the Paradigm in Economics”, Nobel Prize Lecture, Stockholm 2001.
• [9] See Ovidiu ?ichindeleanu, “The Modernity of Postcommunism”, in Adrian T. Sîrbu, Polgar Al. (eds), Genealogies of Postcommunism, Cluj, IDEA 2010.
• [10] See Ovidiu ?ichindeleanu, “Towards A Critical Theory of Postcommunism?”, Radical Philosophy159/ 2010.
• [11] Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1.3, 2000, Duke University Press, p.554.
• [12] See also Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The Rise of the Global Left, New York, Zed Books, 2006.
• [13] See “On the Western Track,”interview wih Pavel Braila by Vlad Morariu, Idea arts + society #27/2007.
• [14] See www.mitfahrzentrale.de; www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de; www.clubture.org.
• [15] Fidel Castro, Havana University Speech, Nov 17 2005. See www.cuba.cu
• [16] Thus, a phenomenon that is forgotten is that in the informal market of videos, the movies were caught in a network of shared community tales about these movies. People who saw one movie retold it to friends, even if the latter has also seen the movie. The story of actively watching the movie trumped thus the movie itself. In the postcommunist formal culture industry, the movies tell the story themselves.
• [17] Gayatri Spivak, Other Asias, London: Blackwell 2007. Spivak introduces the concept of “act of resistance without infrastructure” by referring to forms of resistance of the women in the Global South.

Initial version published in the catalogue of the exhibition Over the Counter. The Phenomena of Post-socialist Economy in Contemporary Art, curated by Eszter Lázár and Zsolt Petrányi, Mücsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest 18 June 2010 – 19 September 2010. You can contact the author at ovidiu.tichindeleanu@yahoo.com.

Berin Golonu: For a series of video interviews, you posed the question “What Is Democracy?” to activists and political analysts across the world. There are also a few artists in the mix. The ensuing recordings (eight videos in all) compose a video installation and a film of the same title. How did you choose these interviewees and why them? What can artists offer us in terms of remedying ineffective and unjust political systems?

Oliver Ressler: I carried out the interviews for “What Is Democracy?” during trips to cities I was invited to present work in, starting in January 2007. There are just three or four artists interviewed in the project. The majority of people are grass-roots activists; some are political analysts, media workers, committed teachers, or leftist unionists. I was interested in people who were able to talk about the problems of the system of representative democracy in an inspiring way, and about what else democracy could be. The profession of my interviewees did not play an important role; I did not even mention it in the film/installation. The idea was to bring together people across states and continents referring to the question, “What is democracy?”. So the idea of a transnational democracy about which Derrida and others have written is embedded in the structure of the film/installation.

BG: Could you say more about what a transnational democracy may look like? The last video of the installation shows national flags as they burn, with a voiceover that talks about how the Western democratic model–that of representative democracy–is bankrupt. Would you suggest doing away with the nationalist model of governance? If so, what possibilities emerge in the post-national aftermath?

OR: Well, this is probably the core question: “what is to be done?” “Transnational democracy” as a term has been used in different discourses. I think it could build on the experiences of transnational social movements, which show that democracy does not have to be grounded in territorially limited units such as nation-states. In my opinion a transnational democracy has to be developed and shaped through political struggles that involve as many people as possible. It shouldn’t be about trying to implement a prescribed concept or idea someone elaborated. Principles such as self-governing, self-management and direct decision-making should be crucial. Delegates or speakers would try to carry out decisions local communities make democratically. If these local communities would decide that in certain instances, forms of representation would be necessary (maybe on a geographically bigger structure), then it would be. But even this representation would be completely different to anything we know as “representative democracy”. For smaller states it might make sense to keep their borders in order to bring together people who try to make decisions democratically. Other states could be dissolved and split into smaller entities, which find themselves through certain interests or projects. These are of course very hypothetical considerations. I think that a binding global contract would also be needed which would have to be decided democratically and would guarantee certain rights and liberties to all individuals globally, in order to hinder for example the development of racist, sexist or homophobic communities.

BG: One of the interviewees brings up Chantal Mouffe’s model of social and political dissensus as posing a positive alternative model to the challenges of globalization. This brought to mind an essay I recently read by Felix Guattari titled “The Three Ecologies” which addresses increasing environmental degradation tied to global capitalist expansion. Guattari believes that counter struggles must simultaneously become more united and increasingly different (through dissensus) to produce, what he calls “fragments that act as catalysts in existential bifurcations.” Is there dissent between the different voices that come together in your video?

OR: Definitely. There are several contradicting opinions in the film/installation, ranging from people who think “representative democracy” can be transformed so that it becomes truly representative for the people who live in it, to people who reject the idea that democracy and representation can go together at all, because these were contradicting ideas. There are activists talking about “direct democracy” but I have the impression that although they use the same term, they may have different ideas about what it means. I think it is extremely important to have a variety of different opinions and ideas in such a project, with the common understanding that the current system has to be overcome. The film/installation gives the audience the possibility to listen to the different arguments and to learn from those they find interesting. It is not really necessary to identify fully with each argument made in the film, as long as it contributes interesting aspects and viewpoints to the larger discussion. “Democracy” as a term and a system of rule is getting emptier and emptier and needs to be filled with new meaning, at least if we continue to consider it a valuable term not to be given up to the right wing.

BG: In the same essay I mentioned, Guattari proposes formulating new ecological practices to activate isolated and repressed singularities. He states that art and artists provide fertile terrain for bringing these new subjectivities and singularities into play. Do you similarly believe that art can provide a creative space for the production of new possibilities? If so, can you talk about how, as a work of art, “What Is Democracy” attempts to tackle such a goal?

OR: In the art world there are numerous spaces that can be used for raising dissent and even to think about alternative organizational structures for the future. That’s why art spaces are important for me and I don’t wanna give them up. “What Is Democracy?” occupies art spaces and tries to drag the audience into a debate about the foundations of our society. As an artist I don’t see myself as an expert on questions of democracy or how to organize society alternatively. There are many others who have a much deeper knowledge and understanding. But through working on long-term projects such as “What is Democracy?” you become kind of an expert on certain details you are interested in. I see my role as more of a catalyst, someone who does not offer technical solutions, but points to possible ways to find them, as curator Marco Scotini once described it. I hope this project points to certain relevant ideas, viewpoints and arguments.

BG: Have there been any past models of wide-scale political organization that you or any of your interviewees look to as inspiring models to build upon?

OR: Looking at the Western world, true democracy has not been achieved in history, at least not as a long lasting, stable model. There were some fantastic democratic experiments such as the Paris Commune in 1871 or the anarchist workers’ collectives during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Unfortunately the reactionary forces were able to smash both pretty soon. In “What Is Democracy?” First Nations People in the US and Australia argue that their original indigenous societies were a kind of true democracy, before these structures were destroyed by invading Europeans. Talking about indigenous communities, we also have the model of the Good Government Junta of the Zapatistas in the south of Mexico, an example of direct-democratic self-governing that still exists today and brings many advantages for people living in these Zapatista villages. I focus on these models in another, ongoing exhibition project titled “Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies” which takes form as sixteen videos and transcribed interviews with economists, political analysts and historians talking about a specific theoretical model each of these theorists has been working on.

BG: How does the “Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies” project differ from “What Is Democracy?” Do they form a dialog with one another?

OR: For “Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies” I produced sixteen videos with economists, political analysts and historians on one specific theoretical model each of these theorists has been working on. In “What Is Democracy?” representative democracy is being criticized from different angles in order to represent democratic principles at work. Both projects are independent from each other, but yes, I think they form a dialog. Hopefully the future will bring an opportunity to present them both together in an exhibition.

from: Where We Are Now Issue #3,  2010

Ressler curated A World Where Many Worlds Fit (2008) for the 2008 Taipei Biennial. The title of this exhibition refers to the Zapatistas’ fight for a less hierarchical and more autonomous world. Highlighting the involvement of artists and collectives with the counter-globalization movement, it presents artworks as descriptions of well-known sites of past demonstrations, counter-summits, and blockades, and attempts to create a productive discussion concerning collective political struggle.

A site-specific billboard created for the Passengers Festival in Warsaw, Don’t Purchase a Better World, Fight for a Better World (2008) connects the emergence of gated communities to social disintegration in post-socialist countries. It depicts a building in a gated community to which Ressler has digitally added broken windows and graffiti from poor and abandoned urban areas. Disrupting the anticipated stability of such protected environments, the image provocatively brings together the worlds of the socially included and excluded, in which, according to the artist, ”associations with an uprising or a militant struggle may be evoked.”

The recent screening of Ressler’s ambitious eight-part film project What Is Democracy? (2009) at 16Beaver in New York City provided a particularly fitting occasion to talk about his investigative artistic practices.

Niels Van Tomme: Asking activists and political analysts around the world to reflect on democracy, What Is Democracy? attempts to show a worldwide analysis of the deep political crisis of the democratic model. As your film makes clear, we are in need of a radical new conception of democracy. In which way is such reinvention possible?

Oliver Ressler: There are interesting ideas circulating about how to organize a society in a different and more democratic way than it is the case today. What Is Democracy? asked this question to people in different cities around the world in order to formulate a critique of representative democracy and arguments we should take into consideration when starting to conceptualize a new system. Such a new democratic system should have certain institutions, giving people the possibility to get more directly involved with decision-making processes than they do in a representative democracy, which is actually not able to represent people accordingly. It should include the right to decide under which system people would like to live, and would probably lead toward the development of a variety of different models of how societies organize themselves in different corners of the world. I believe that such models should be developed through intense discussions that involve as many people as possible. Powerful social movements should then be ready to struggle for a radical transformation of society and a completely new redistribution of property and power than the one we know today.

Niels Van Tomme: What was your initial inspiration for this project? How did you start working on such extensive global undertaking?

Oliver Ressler: In 2003 I started a large-scale ongoing exhibition project, Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies (2003-2008), for which I produced 16 video interviews with economists, political analysts, and historians on theoretical models, or concepts, for alternative societies to replace capitalism with. While the people I interviewed for that project were all theorists, What Is Democracy? mostly consisted of interviews with activists. I set forth to discover how far the knowledge about the systematic failures of representative democracy and alternative concepts of democracy are spread around the world, how far these ideas have become democratized. In What Is Democracy? representative democracy is being criticized from different angles in order to represent democratic principles at work.

Starting from January 2007, when I was invited to participate in exhibitions in several interesting cities with parliamentary democracies, I used some of these (paid) trips to carry out the interviews and record the visual material for the film and the installation. It started as a no-budget project, and till the end I recorded all the interviews on my own, with my own camera.

Niels Van Tomme: Dealing with issues of racism, migration, economics, genetic engineering, and forms of resistance, your artistic practice is highly political in nature. How do you deal with the tension between aesthetic and activist gestures in your work? Do you consider them as inherently contradictory aspects of an overarching artistic project, or as mutually exclusive?

Oliver Ressler: It would be great to overcome the division between activists and artists. I’m interested in working in the field of art, but at the same time I feel the necessity to go beyond that and not limit my work to the art world. I can’t give a general answer regarding the relation between the aesthetic and activist aspects in my work, as they are different from project to project. Some installations obviously stay within the confines of art institutions and I can only try to bring interested people from other contexts into there. But especially the films get a huge audience outside the art world. Activists have the possibility to present them, to use them for their own activities. In the case of the three films I did on the counter-globalization movement, or the films on the political processes in Venezuela, the majority of the screenings were not connected to the art scene at all.

Niels Van Tomme: Earlier this week, I came upon an interesting quote by Francis Alys: “Society allows (and maybe expects) the artist, unlike the journalist, the scientist, the scholar or the activist, to issue a statement without any demonstration: this is what we call ‘poetic license’.” I’m wondering if such concerns are also important to you while working on your projects?

Oliver Ressler: The majority of my works are not very poetic. Sometimes more conservative members of the art world even question them to be art at all… When I make a statement I also try to provide the necessary background information to that statement. I’m not the kind of artist who likes to play the role of the clown or freak, I want to be taken seriously. I often decide in my work to not make a statement myself, but to create a context, or environment, that allows political activists and analysts to make statements. In these cases, my work is more concerned with editing and combining statements in a structure of a film or an installation.

Niels Van Tomme: Boom! (2001-ongoing), a collaborative project with artist David Thorne, consists of banners designed for anti-capitalist demonstrations. However, unlike the renowned handmade aesthetics of protest art, these banners are highly designed endeavors that echo the aesthetic language of marketing strategies, and are thus deeply rooted in the visual language of capitalism. Are you suggesting that we need to envisage revolutionary practice against capitalism and globalization from within?

Oliver Ressler: The Boom! banners are texts that are being published in the format of (dysfunctional) URL addresses. The initial idea was to start with a kind of repetition of the myths of globalization that appear as if a CEO or conservative politician has depicted them, and that are ironically distorted as the text continues. Maybe this repetition of neoliberal propaganda is the reason why we decided for the banners to have a visual language that is closer to advertisement than to handmade protest imagery. But we also wanted to challenge the dominant language of protest and contribute something to it that did not exist before. And, the practice of protest and its visual language has to be questioned permanently. Surprisingly enough, capitalism still exists, so anti-capitalist protest has to improve itself and find new strategies and perspectives of non-parliamentary opposition.

Niels Van Tomme: I’m wondering if there is any impact you are aiming for with your work? What do you hope that your audience will take away from it?

Oliver Ressler: Many of my projects deal with major issues and include valuable information, but they go beyond pure content delivery. It is very important who is in the speaking position. In several works, grassroots activists of social movements appear as speakers, people that are usually not being heard or listened to. As an artist I’m refusing to take in the role of an expert. My role is to be a sort of catalyst, someone who is not offering technical solutions, but someone who points to possible ways to find them, as curator Marco Scotini described it.

I very often try to realize artworks that also make sense for people who have no particular knowledge about contemporary art. The works should somehow speak for themselves and do not have to be experienced based on the knowledge of specific discourses that are important to the art system. I wish to support progressive social processes, and attempt, through my work, to make a small contribution toward a change in society.

Niels Van Tomme: Are you currently working on any new projects?

Oliver Ressler: I’m always working on something… The most advanced project is a curatorial one titled Absolute Democracy, which I’m doing in collaboration with artist Carlos Motta. It will be presented as an exhibition at Futura in Prague at the end of the year. The idea of an absolute democracy, as we see it, entails a thorough rethinking of the linear, fixed, and orthodox production of historical knowledge and narratives. It’s an idea that suggests the need for the redistribution of wealth and power and the need for new systems of rule. The exhibition Absolute Democracy presents works by artists who critically investigate, or problematize, “democracy,” as a concept whose social, political, and economic implications play an important role in the formation of individual and collective subjectivity. Some of the artists in the exhibition propose alternative readings of repressed histories, while others denounce traditional structures of discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and so on.

Niels Van Tomme is a curator, researcher, art critic, and frequent contributor to Afterimage, Art Papers, Foreign Policy in Focus and (h)ART. The Director of Arts and Media at Provisions Learning Project in Washington, DC, he lives in New York. His independently curated exhibitions have been shown internationally.

From: Foreign Policy in Focus, http://www.fpif.org, 2010

It is still necessary to point that democracy is not a universal set of values and practices miraculously discovered in ancient Greece and brought back to reality in an improved, modern form by the Western civilization, but a relatively recent concept which is inseparable from the history of violence and colonialism of the modern world, even when pointed in dialectical opposition to systematic destruction, injustice and enclosures. To mention just one example, the Tupac Amaru rebellion (1780-82) and the Haitian Revolution (1780s–1804) have not been part of the repertoire of emancipatory and democratic learnings to any comparable extent with the “American” Revolution and the French Revolution. Furthermore, as it can be seen in the relentless return of the question What is the alternative to representative democracy? – the same cultural-political body of democracy keeps on returning and acting host to the problem. Even “direct democracy” or “participative democracy”, understood as the opened imaginary opposite to the determined enclosures of “representative democracy” have to be liberated first from the modern/colonial frame of democracy, emancipation and rationality, in order to avoid duplicating the same master idea of democracy (the king’s body) to infinity. One has to point out that the conservative right also provided in the past twenty years an answer and alternative vision to representative democracy: the “civil society” of Eastern Europe and the “orange revolutions”, as well as the blatantly racist doctrine of “the few, happy chosen ones” who are opposed to the “naturally” corrupted people and formal political sphere. The history of real socialism was also filtered by Eurocentrism: it is no accident that Lenin’s famous saying “the Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true” is found in one of his most Eurocentric texts, “The three sources and three components of Marxism” from 1913, on the thirtieth anniversary of Marx’s death. Often quoted out of context, both textual and political, Lenin binds there the political legacy of Marx to the “civilised world”, to “the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.” Lenin laid thus the symbolic foundations of the theory of transition (from feudalism to capitalism to socialism) that situated real socialism within the paradigm of the modern/colonial/capitalist world. Consequently, as Walter Mignolo also emphasized, in order to keep alive the question what is democracy, one has to be open to look not for alternative modernities, but to alternatives to modernity.

The Postcommunist Transition and Democracy

The dictionary meaning of a word should not be mistaken for its conceptual and praxical history. To ask the question about democracy – this is the first step towards reclaiming autonomous political thought, which actually means something very simple: thinking from the position in which you already are. My own perspective of the world is shaped by the experience of an immigrant or “global exiled” who lived the “transition” from the former Socialist Bloc into the “Free World”. In my view “democracy” has been indeed one of the fundamental symbols of the postcommunist transition, by which I understand the fundamental concept of the historical shift 1989-2009, namely the reformation of enclosures in the form of top-to-bottom reorganization of power structures and reintegration of the former Socialist Bloc into Western political and military structures and into the world system of capitalism. In the (re)formation of the postcommunist public spheres, from both West and East, democracy has been a symbol rather than a concept: the symbol of the bright side of Western modernity, conceived as the only side. The idea of “democracy” materialized in postcommunism in mechanisms of interpellation demanding instantaneous comprehension and acknowledgement rather than an invitation to collective reasoning or a process of social valuing. Democracy is one of the prominent symbols of the ideological framework of transition, adding to the metonymical and monocultural definition of the meaning of postcommunist history: from past to future, from tyranny to freedom, from madness to normalcy, from backwardness to civilization, from totalitarianism to democracy, from communism to capitalism, from behind the Iron Curtain to the Free World, from East to West. The symbol of democracy has a special role in this framework, providing the main representations of the teleological end of transition, which was identified in the workings of postcommunist public spheres with anticommunism, the “Western civilization” and, last but not least, with capitalism. Under the light of this vision, for some parts of the former Socialist Bloc, democracy even meant shock therapy and lustration – in a glaring illustration of the coloniality of power operating within the modern concept of democracy.

The postcommunist transition has been a process in which the people’s participation to the political was allowed only in temporary and carefully controlled moments, such as elections and election-related referendums. And when the people did show up – such as in the miner’s rebellions of the 1990s, or the later strikes and protests, the “masses” have been blamed by the elites for all the shortcomings and violence, in typical gestures of internal colonization. Shortly put, the actual history of democracy for the past twenty years in postcommunist Europe shows that “democracy” has been the politics of the elite, complete with the delegitimation of the idea of popular sovereignty, which had been temporarily reactualized in the Revolutions of 1989. In this sense, the smooth transition of anticommunist dissidents is both symptomatic and important in itself, for after 1989 almost none of the anticommunist dissidents can be associated with politics of autonomy and independence, but rather with the cohabitation and direct participation into State and capitalist power structures, and with the local colonization of dominant ideologies like neoconservatism and neoliberalism. Often in discursive opposition to the economic and political elites, the elite anticommunist intellectuals have been nevertheless the local promoters of explicit apologies of violence such as lustration and of doctrines of an Eurocentric elite. Not in the least thanking to the large contribution of the “civil society” and anticommunist dissidents and intellectuals, the working class, which has been the main driving force of the social movements of 1989, was vanished as a political category, in spite of the proletarization of all occupations and levels of education in the experience of immigrant labor of East-Europeans. Shortly put, in the actual history of the transition from the Socialist Bloc to the Free World, democracy means politics of the elite.

It has been said that the West also rediscovered the historical meaning of “democracy” through the experience of East Europeans after 1989. This actually means that the symbol of “Western modernity” acquired positive value, cashed on the notion of “freedom” and renewed its repression of the dark side of modernity. In the postcommunist era, from the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Second Iraqi War, the word “freedom” arguably meant theft, neocolonization, military invasion, torture and uprooting. For all the optimism of discourses pronounced at the most institutionalized political levels, within both West and Eastern Europe, police forces and police militarization are at an all-time high, the apparatuses of repression of popular demonstrations are beyond control and even documentation, the harassment of people identified as “dangerous activists” has become a routine (and includes domicile visits and other scare tactics), and the truth is that illegal camps for the detention of immigrants have been set all over Europe during this period of the rediscovery of democracy, the postcommunist transition. The global lesson of postcommunism is that democracy meant in the Western world, in the aftermath of a new colonial experience, predominantly the politics of the elite and the reactualization of the coloniality of power.

Speaking in Truth and the Need for Negative Politics

When it comes to opening the meaning of democracy, the international left is restricted not only by the interpellation of finding alternatives to modernity, but also by a certain desire to speak in truth, to be in the full positiveness of an alternative episteme – and this constitutes also the most difficult part of Oliver Ressler’s movie, one that deserves a film consideration of its own. The title given by Oliver Ressler provides however already the best clue as to how to transgress this problematic fullness: one has to ask the question, and to reflect on what it means to ask this question. The negative side of the story is enlightening: democracy appears as a means of framing the possibilities of experience, a notion used to justify violent enclosures and reservations and to neutralize concrete struggles. We can further elaborate, arguing that the coloniality of power operates through the notion of democracy by enforcing a certain difference between the non-modern and the modern, a division between civilization and non-civilization, nature and culture that reduces arbitrarily the possibilities of political experience and communal life. The movie does well to deconstruct the notion that for the Revolution to succeed, it has to happen in the Western centers of capitalism and power. For a good part of the international left, the positive epistemic field emerges indeed by learning from the revolutionary experiences of Latin America, from Chiapas to Bolivia, and as Anibal Quijano insisted, the future of the planet may well be linked to the possibilities of indigenous politics.

However, Lenin’s dictum is still haunting Europe. Maybe an interpretation of Deleuze’s conception of resistance as something ontologically positive can also be blamed here for the undeniable effect of forgetting that resistance always includes a negative stance at the level of praxis. By conceiving resistances or the alternatives to modernity only in their positiveness, one could also help the systematic destruction and impoverishment of the repertoire of tactics that links and has linked negative politics to democracy and social justice: revolutions, rebellions, strikes, refusals of interpellation, obscurity and double-sense… Which is why one of the lessons of maintaining the question of democracy alive is that the richness of negative politics is also part of the answer.

From: TransEurope, #9, 2010

This paper is based on Ele Carpenter’s discussion of Oliver Ressler’s work at Late at the Tate, 7th May 2010, on the eve of the UK General Election, and just 17 days after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig explosion. The talk was part of the Transeuropa Festival and was organized in partnership with ‘This Is Not A Gateway’ for Late at the Tate.

Ele Carpenter is an artist, curator and writer, she is teaches on the MFA Curating at Goldsmiths College London, and is HUMlab Research Fellow at BildMuseet, Umeå University, Sweden.

The question “What is democracy?” both touches on our frustrations with current parliamentary representative democracies and encourages us to consider different approaches to what a more democratic system might look like.

Oliver Ressler is an artist who makes films and installations about political questions. His practice is perhaps unusual as an art-activist because he does not use art as an illustrative model, but as form of research based enquiry with sensitivity to the mode of representation. Rather than using the conventions of ‘Spectacle’ to compete with the mainstream to attract mass audiences, Ressler uses a more considered, often subtle, play on concepts of representation. In the film ‘What is Democracy? (Ressler, 2009) these range from presence and absence of the speaker, poetic use of everyday signage and symbolism in the built environment, and collaboration with artist Zanny Begg to explore some of the metaphorical ideas expressed in the interviews. Chapter 3 on secrecy and transparency uses a distinctive approach to representing a forbidden landscape, with an awareness of surveillance technologies and screen based culture.

In this project Ressler asked the question “What is democracy?” to numerous activists and political analysts in 15 cities around the world: Amsterdam, Berkeley, Berlin, Bern, Budapest, Copenhagen, Moscow, New York, Rostock, San Francisco, Sydney, Taipei, Tel Aviv, Thessaloniki and Warsaw. This list reads like a flight departures board, and throughout the film we are continually reminded of global transport infrastructure, from rail freight to the continuous hum of airplanes in the sky.

The interviewees were asked the same question, revealing a multiplicity of different perspectives from people living in countries that are usually labeled as ‘democracies’. The interviews form the basis of the film in eight parts, which represents personal perspectives about the deep political crisis of the Western democratic model. In the opening interview Kuan-Hsing Chen ponders on the question:

“I guess the problem is really the problem of history, when representative democracy was invented, and then imposed on earth. … Right now, nobody is happy with political party politics, which is not real representative democracy. … It was invented in a particular historical moment, but through… history of expansion or imperialism and so on, it’s been spread around the world. At that moment there is/was no other alternative… by now everyone is asking themselves, what is the alternative to representative democracy?”

(Kuan-Hsing Chen, Taipai Art Park, Chapter 1, What is Democracy? A Film by Oliver Ressler, 2009)

As Ressler explains on his website – the film explores the contested notion of “democracy”, which is misused for the maintenance of order by those in power, while at the same time “democracy” still represents an ideal that hundreds of millions people in the South desperately want to achieve. Today it seems almost impossible to be against the idea of “democracy”, even though the word seems to be redundant. But Ressler’s interviewees offer a potential strategy to reclaim and give new meaning to the term “democracy”. He writes “In this sense, the film presents a multi-layered discourse on democracy, which expresses a broad field of opinions that go beyond the borders of nation-states.”

The interviews combine to give an overview of the historical, ethical, and practical approaches to rethinking and experimenting with different kinds of democracy, as Ressler highlights: Adam Ostolski (Warsaw) explains that originally “the modern idea of democracy was connected to the notion of progress” and parliamentary states “had some tendency to become more and more democratic by including new types of political actors, such as workers and women. […] But since the 1980s, since the neoliberal trend in politics and economy, we have a regression of democracy.” Nikos Panagos (Thessaloniki) argues that “representation and democracy are incompatible terms. Therefore, under no circumstances could the present system be called a democracy. It is just a sophisticated form of oligarchy.” While some subjects in the videos elaborate their ideas of direct democracy or decision-making processes of indigenous communities, David McNeill (Sydney) raises the issue of whether it makes sense to continue fighting to reclaim the term, or whether “it has been so corrupted and polluted by the conservatives” that it should be surrendered.

What is remarkable about watching the films is the similarity between the experience of non-democratic governments (such as Russia and Taiwan) and our own experience of representative democracy in the UK. This seems to occur because any system, democratic or otherwise, is used to uphold the values of the state over individuals. And in some instances this seems to be a good thing (such as the law against capital punishment in the UK). In other situations it breaches human rights and democratic values.

Again, the constant hum of airplanes is ever-present, reminding us of the shrinking distances between people, as countries become destinations, and culture is recast as tourism. This is especially pertinent as we watch these films in the Tate in London.

This paper discusses a selection of chapters from ‘What Is Democracy?’ which relate to the context of the Late at Tate event, addressing the culture and identity of the East End of London, situated in the (BP sponsored) exhibition of Turner’s paintings, as the British government works out how to be, or not to be, a hung parliament. We will soon find out if the Labour party will form a coalition with the Liberal democrats, perhaps the last phase of the ‘left’ morphing into centralist neoliberalism. Or if the conservatives will collaborate with the Liberal Democrats to form a clearly centre-right government, at least enabling the Labour party to review it’s socialist history.

Firstly we shall consider Tone Nielsen’s support for Chantal Mouffe’s call for agonistic politics, and what this might mean for the extremist groups such as the BNP (British National Party) who have been campaigning throughout the country, but especially in the East End of London.

Nielsen explains Mouffe’s argument that – once parties abandon their political project and accept globalization they abandon the responsibility of the social left. As a result voters loose confidence in the political system, and move to the opposite ends of the political spectrum. They are then outside democratic discourse and systems which leaves room for fundamentalisms. Mouffe (2000, 2005) argues that if we want people to be free we must always allow for the possibility that conflict may appear, and that the democratic process should provide an arena where differences can be confronted. Here Mouffe argues for a return to adversarial politics, where politics can be fully discussed rather than trying to support the status quo.

This discussion takes place within the exhibition of JMW Turner’s paintings of Italy. This room, full of amazing landscapes each with their utopian vision and critique of empire, seems a perfect setting for considering the relationship between democracy and landscape, rights and maps.

Turner’s oil painting ‘Ancient Rome; Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus, exhibited 1839’ depicts a significant moment in the decline of the Roman Empire (1). The magnificent architecture of the city of Rome floats like a vision on the canvas, an image of the past built upon the knowledge of the ruins in the present. A fading image of an Empire which explored aspects of democracy such as the forum (depicted in another of Turner’s paintings).

These themes are also explored in Ressler’s films. In Chapter 3 ‘Secrecy instead of democratic transparency’ Trevor Paglen talks about the military nuclear test sites in the Nevada desert, as a betrayal of the enlightenment promise of democracy. Here secrecy creates absences, black sites, blindspots on maps and holes in financial and legal systems, where global corporations create their own legitimacy. Not dissimilar from the legal infrastructure around oil pipelines which protect the rights of the company over and above the rights of the local population (Marriott & Muttitt, 2002). This is not a blind spot, but a blind line, which is projected across the paintings in this very room, by the oil company logo on the introductory panel.

Ressler, like Turner, struggles with how to represent the unrepresentable or unimaginable. Although Ressler’s challenge is the legal structures forbidding the filming of a particular landscape, Turner is faced with representing the past. In both images the architecture of empire glows in the distance, fading in and out of light. The architecture combines with landscape to create a sense of the sublime, where human nature is truly awesome and awful. This ‘technological sublime’ is described by Jones as part of the conventional mode of the sublime:

“… a sense of transcendence in the face of scenes of natural and manmade grandeur, gigantic bridges and seemingly infinite railways which competed with the divine in provoking terror and awe …” (Jones, 2006, p202)

Jones continues to describe the digital sublime:

“…quietly terrifying in its indeterminate ubiquity, awesome in its invasive as well as its pervasive power, the dynamo is always humming behind the virginal landscape.” (Jones, 2006, p203)

Ressler carefully combines aspects of the digital and technological sublime in filmic construction of the work. He uses an inserted window, like a webcam window, to depict the intervention of the speakers’ commentary on the landscape. This framing device cleverly both collapses and creates distance within the film. The window presents the speaker as both distanced observer, perhaps in another location, and as an intervening commentator, positioning him in proximity to the site he is unable to record or capture from his own position. We are reminded of the opening sequences of the film depict public notices prohibiting filming and photography of the site.

This remote-viewer commentary is familiar in the world of politics, where both politicians and activists behave like actors rehearsing roles on separate stages. These performances are particularly bizarre when one realizes that the locus of power is actually elsewhere. It seems that many political decisions are made by or for global corporations moving capital, in the form of data and material resources, around the planet.

In chapter 5 Lize Mogel (speaking from the financial district in New York) notes that the market is part of democracy, and when you talk about representative democracy today you are not necessarily talking about individuals being represented, but about capital being represented. These observations raise the question of why we are voting for politicians at all, when we might more appropriately vote directly for Capital as an act of economic and political transparency. These questions remind me of Mark Fisher’s reiteration of the provocation ‘It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ (Fisher, 2009) perhaps inciting an acceleration of capitalism to fulfill it’s own endgame, as if we could anticipate history in this way.

The ‘identity correction’ of performance activism such as the Yes Men could be seen as a contribution to speeding up the transparency of capitalism on its own terms (2). But at the same time socially engaged artists and activists are seeking alternative ways of horizontal self-organization by helping to facilitate localized frameworks for social change. The discussion of Direct Democracy in chapter 6 by Macha Kurzina in Moscow, and Joanna Erbel in Warsaw, raises the complexity of open citizenship, and highlights the importance of time required for participation. These questions of democratic participation are a central feature of socially engaged artists, but instantly marginalized by art institutions, where the glass ceiling of participation frequently prevents ‘participants’ from becoming active collaborators.

In the penultimate chapter, Jenny Munroe, in Sydney, urges people to look to indigenous forms of consensus decision making as an older and more effective form of organization. She eloquently describes the way in which WASPish Australia has marginalized and ignored the wisdom of aboriginal culture. Her articulate call to understand older forms of organization and problem solving, rather than mimicking corporate power, might just enable us to move into a future form of democracy that we want to live in. Jenny Munroe’s ideas return us to the opening speech by Kuan-Hsing Chen, who suggests that “democracy doesn’t operate at the level of the state, but at the level of the social” and calls for local self-organised solutions. Whether people believe that local direct democracy is possible on a global scale or not, the investigation and experimentation with the old models of decision making is part of the political process of finding out what democracy is and can be.

• References
• Fisher, Mark, 2009. Capitalist Realism. London: Zero Books.
• Jones, Steven, E., (2006) Against Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism. New York / Oxford: Routledge.
• Marriott,. James & Greg Muttitt, (2002). Some Common Concerns: Imagining BP’s Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey pipelines system. London: Platform. Available at: http://www.carbonweb.org/showitem.asp?article=100&parent=9
• Mouffe, Chantal, (2000) The Democratic Paradox. Verso: London / New York
• Mouffe, Chantal (2005) On the Political. Routledge.
• Ressler, Oliver (2009) What is Democracy? A film by Oliver Ressler, 118 min., 2009. Available at:
• http://www.ressler.at/what_is_democracy_film/

• Footnotes
• (1) The text panel for the painting reads: “JMW Turner, 1775 – 1851. Ancient Rome; Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus exhibited 1839. Oil on Canvas. In this painting, Turner’s brush has created a vision of the past, restoring to their former glory the archeological remains he had seen for himself in Rome. The theme of the picture is the degeneration of empire. Germanicus was a popular Roman general who was murdered in Antioch in AD 19 and whose ashes were carried back to Italy by his widow, Agrippina. He was the father of Caligula and grandfather of Nero, both despotic and tyrannical emperors, and his passing symbolized a significant moment in the inexorable decline of imperial Rome.“
• (2) In the mode of Performance Art identity correction, it might be more appropriate to give every Tate visitor a BP logo for their lapel, reinforcing an over-identification with the corporation, rather than shouting slogans on the steps outside.

The concepts of relational power (Hardt & Negri, 2000), rhizomatic networks (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), temporary autonomous zones (Hakim Bey, 1985), and tactical interventions into the everyday (de Certeau, 1984), underpin much socially engaged art practice, as well as the anti-capitalist movement. But rather than referencing the aesthetics of DIY or collaborative culture, Ressler lives it through his work: finding film-makers, writers and theorists to collaborate in rigorous investigation into the myriad of tactics with which people are finding ways to express their social connectivity and alternative economic culture around the world.

In the film What Would It Mean to Win? (Begg & Ressler, 2008) John Holloway talks about protest as asymmetrical to capitalism because it proposes a different way of organising and being. In the publication accompanying the exhibition AEAS, (Ressler, 2007) Gregory Sholette describes the asymmetrical networks of the artworld: one which is based on mutual aid and gift economy, and the other on a market economy of institutional representation supported by art dealers and collectors (p15-16). It is possible to map the characteristics of informal production and distribution methods in art and activism. However, it is an unstable map, where artists often keep (or desire) a relationship with the formal art economy, both to legitimise their work aesthetically as art, and to keep the art-world as a communication/distribution channel for financial as well as ideological reasons.

Horizontal artist and activist networks are in contrast to the pyramid of capitalism (George, 1992), and attempt to construct spaces for dialogue, consensus decision-making and action as a model for social change. But there are problems here – in many ways the activist message utilises mainstream communication tactics, where art adds complexity and often confusion.

As an artist and film-maker Ressler is both representing activism, and expressing his political interests through the work, but what are the conceptual and aesthetic concerns of this process?

From an activist perspective it may seem banal to consider how Ressler’s practice reconciles his role as an activist within artistic terms. But for artists the question of cultural expression and representation lies at the heart of political change. Whilst both the mainstream and activist media often depict the polarities of political positions, Ressler attempts a more reflexive view. Every film includes the cultural context and explores the role of creativity in political change. But certain aspects of his work deal with complexity and ambiguity in representation, more than others.

Ressler’s films acknowledge activism as a form of self-expression (creatively, as well as politically), but they are also conscious of their own role of representing particular subjectivities (Bromberg, 2006).

The film 5 Factories – Worker Control in Venezuela (Azzellini & Ressler, 2006) examines the contemporary experience of co-operatively run companies supported by the controversial public reforms of the Chavez government. But the film is not typical of much activist documentary where high emotional drama can leave the viewer informed but completely exhausted, guilty and disempowered. Neither is it a charitable request, or a government information film. Instead it is a considered presentation of a model for an alternative economy in progress. Ressler and Azzellini take care to include the voices of workers from all areas of the production and management process. The content of the film is narrated through the individual experiences of the workers, inter-cut with visually seductive film-shots of the scale and beauty of the industrial production process. These shots, combined with the workers narratives, clearly represent knowledge of the raw material, and pride of ownership of the production process.

Symmetry and Asymmetry
There is symmetry throughout Ressler’s work – firstly in the analogy between art and activism as exploring worlds that are both asymmetrical to capitalism. Secondly, the films often work as pairs, with documentary of protest in Europe screened alongside evidence of alternative economies in other continents. Watching the film What Would It Mean to Win? (Begg & Ressler, 2008) is made manifest through the example of 5 Factories (Azzellini & Ressler, 2006). They form a diptych reflecting ambition and meaning between the two continents and cultures, each forming a context for the other.

There is symmetry of responsibility in Ressler’s work. The audience is not simply given information, they are asked to think, to imagine and to enact. The challenge of the Imagine… texts speaks directly to the audience, taking John Lennon’s day-dreaming into a series of specific socio-political propositions. Here, the artist creates a vision, and takes others on a process of visioning the world in a different way. Whilst the films document a socio-political movement, the texts challenge audiences to apply these ideological struggles, to our own experience.

But lastly – I want to introduce a type of linguistic symmetry that has been less critiqued within Ressler’s practice.

Ressler’s most conceptual and ambiguous work has been realised through collaboration with David Thorne. They have created designs for a series of 3 BOOM! Banners (2004), which feature extremely long url’s. The banners are designed for public space, both physically – strung across the city square, and virtually as website domain names, exploring the complexity of protest in public space. The almost impossible websites (no-one has bought the domain names yet) use a different visual and linguistic strategy compared to the films and Imagine texts.

The banner slogan is written in one continuous line without spaces. One of the texts reads:

www.ifonlypeoplewouldopentheirheartstothevisionthatfreedomisonthemarchandbelievethattheyarebeingspiritedonthewingsofangelstoabright
andshiningfuturecalledglobalfreemarketdemocracythenthefactthatthisvisionthingonlybecomesclearaftertheireyesaregougedoutandtheycannot
seewheretheyaregoingatallandthattherearenoangelsleadingthewayonthislongforcedmarchcouldbebetterleftunsaid.com

Activism (and media) has a tendency to simplify the message, in a way that art can mimic, parody or interrogate. Ressler’s films are serious, even when depicting performance-art activism that uses humor as a tactic (Begg & Ressler, 2008), whereas the BOOM! banners embody both the utopianism and symbolic nature of action in virtual space, with irony and humor. Ressler and Thorne describe the intention of the work:

“to mix up the rhetoric of oppositional politics and to complicate the visual and verbal languages of protest.”

The text is symmetrical, which leads the reader to try and decipher meaning through this pattern. The words ‘vision’, ‘march’, and ‘angels’ are repeated. The nature of ‘vision’ shifts from the imaginary to blinding. ‘Angels’ emerge as saviours and then disappear. Perhaps the work is a metaphor for utopianism being swallowed up by the wheels of political structures.

This particular url merges several centuries of protest and political romanticism, from protest-march to forced-march, questioning it’s autonomy and efficacy. But rather than decoding the meaning of the message – we can only ask a series of questions; the meaning may not be in the message, but in the question you ask yourself.

This text was written in 2008. Dr Ele Carpenter is currently a Research Fellow at HUMLab, Umeå University, Sweden.

References

Azzellini, Dario, and Oliver Ressler (2006). 5 Factories: Worker Control in Venezuela. DVD, 81 min, PAL, Spanish with English subtitles.
Begg, Zanny, and Oliver Ressler (2008) What Would it Mean to Win? DVD 40min. English with German or French subtitles.
Bey, Hakim (1985/1991). T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zones. Autonomedia.
Bromberg, Ava (2006) Along the Path of Revolution: Worker Control in Venezuela, Agency in Art.
de Certeau, Michel (1984/2002) The practice of everyday life. Translated by Steven Rendall. University of California Press: California.
Deleuze, Gilles. Felix Guattari (1987 / 2004) “Introduction: Rhizome.” In: A Thousand Plateaus London, New York: Continuum. p3-28.
George, Susan (1992) The Debt Boomerang: How third world debt harms us all. Pluto Press / Trans National Institute: Netherlands.
Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000). Empire. Cambridge, Massachussetts/ London: Harvard University Press.
Ressler, Oliver (2007) Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies. Wyspa Institute of Art: Gdansk.
Wikipedia, (2008) Hugo Chavez, Wikipedia.

Oliver Ressler: The time between Chris Gilbert’s invitation to produce a new piece on Venezuela and the exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum was actually quite short. It was only slightly more than half a year. This is actually one of the shortest periods I’ve had to produce a new piece in the recent years. But this was also an exception, as the invitation came along with a quite generous production budget and the invitation for a solo show.

TP: How were the five factories selected? Did you visit a range of factories before you decided which five to work with?

OR: Dario and I were interested in focusing on those factories that had already introduced models of workers’ self-management or co-management (“cogestion”). So the film presents a selection of factories that had functioning structures of workers’ democracy at the time when we recorded the film [fall 2005]. One of the factories we already knew from our previous film Venezuela from Below; the paper factory Invepal, located in Morón, appears in both films.

Dario, who at this time had already been living for several months a year in Venezuela, found further interesting examples of forms of co- or self-management. When we arrived in Caracas for the production of 5 Factories—Worker Control in Venezuela, we participated in a congress on occupied factories in Latin America where we made important contacts with workers in occupied factories in Venezuela and got some hints about specific factories in which interesting experiments were going on. So we chose “our” factories quite carefully in advance, as we had limitations in shooting time and budget. We filmed only six factories, and in the editing process we decided finally to use the material of five factories for the video installation.

TP: As a matter of curiosity, what materials or goods were produced at the sixth factory that was not included in the final production?

OR: It produced diapers. The factory had an owner, who was also the director, and it was run in a kind of co-management together with the workers. After carrying out the interviews, our impression was that the director had decided on a form of co-management because it gave him access to cheap public credit he wouldn’t have got otherwise. But the workers did not seem to be involved a lot in the major decision-making processes. The factory did not inspire us, and this is why, even when we were still traveling around in Venezuela, we decided not to include the factory in the final project.

TP: Has the piece been exhibited as an installation since it was shown at the Berkeley Art Museum?

OR: No, the six-channel video installation 5 Factories—Worker Control in Venezuela has not been presented since its launch in Berkeley. But some months after the opening of the exhibition, Dario and I finished an eighty-one-minute, single-channel version and produced a DVD with three language versions (English, Spanish, and German). This film was shown a lot and is still being shown in art institutions, cinemas, film festivals, and local TV channels, as well as in hundreds of screenings organized by the Bolivarian circles all over the world. Several unions and workers’ organizations use the film for educational purposes, and through California Newsreel the film is now also widely distributed in the U.S. In the meantime Korean and Turkish versions of 5 Factories—Worker Control in Venezuela have been issued. It is one of the most successful and well-known pieces I ever did.

TP: In his introductory remarks to the MATRIX booklet that accompanied your exhibition, curator Chris Gilbert wrote, “The Projects in the yearlong MATRIX cycle Now-Time Venezuela: Media Along the Path of the Bolivarian Process will operate in solidarity with this process. They are not only or even primarily representations of or reflections on this process, but, as our title indicates, along the path itself.” How did the curatorial lens of the exhibition (the idea to create works in solidarity with a social process) affect your creation of it?

OR: Not at all. I assume Chris Gilbert chose Dario and me for the show because we already did one film in solidarity with the Bolivarian Process in 2004. Venezuela from Below focuses on different grassroots efforts in Venezuela that have in common support for the Bolivarian Process and defense of it against its enemies. This first film already thematizes (besides many other aspects) occupied factories, and in 5 Factories—Worker Control in Venezuela we concentrate on this aspect and observe the changes, which developed two years later. When Chris Gilbert contacted us, Dario and I were already discussing a second collaborative film on Venezuela, and Chris’s invitation meant for us that this second project got developed and produced much faster than it would have otherwise.

The invitation to do the first exhibition of the MATRIX cycle Now-Time Venezuela: Media Along the Path of the Bolivarian Process led in any case to the development of the format of the six-channel video installation, where all five factories were presented on individual projections with benches and headphones in front of them, and the management meeting of the aluminum plant Alcasa was presented on the sixth projection at the end of the installation.

TP: One of the facets of the work that struck me was how it drew on histories of democratic processes being introduced into media production, blending ideas of the “Cinema of the People” with pedagogical concepts drawn from the ideas of Paolo Freire. Can you speak about the models that you were drawing on in the creation of this piece?

OR: I had already done a couple of films focusing on protagonists of social movements. In the case of the self-managed factories it was very important for Dario and me to present the protagonists directly in their work environment. The speaking workers are in the center. As the workers manage to run the production on their own, they are being recorded directly in their workplace, which increasingly seems to be for them a place of self-determination and less a place of exploitation. It is important for the concept of the film not to interview only the press spokesmen or engineers in the factories but average workers who are usually not interviewed. Very often our audience overlooks the fact that most people we interviewed spoke for the first time in front of a camera. The workers are capable of speaking in such an eloquent manner about modes of organization because they are used to discussion with their colleagues in the workers’ assemblies. It would be almost impossible to carry out similar thoughtful interviews with average workers in the U.S. or Europe.

In comparison to many other films on Venezuela, we did not focus on Hugo Chávez but tried to highlight the interesting processes that became possible through the political changes, which in the dominating media discourse are usually hidden behind the charismatic president. In the film only workers speak and there are no commentaries. The idea is to develop arguments and provide information about the factories through the protagonists only, and not to talk about them.

TP: Can you describe the “preparation” for your filming in each of the factories? Did you meet with the workers as an assembly to outline the project, or were the interviews the first time that you engaged with them? Were the individual workers self-selected?

OR: With one exception we were in contact with one worker at each factory who knew that we would come filming. When we arrived we usually discussed with a small group of delegates, outlined our concept, and told them about the variety of different workers we wanted to film. We asked these people for advice about which of the workers had something interesting to say. We tried to make sure that employees from different departments would participate, that there was a kind of a gender balance, and that we represented people who have been working in the factory for many years and those who just started.

In the case of the ketchup factory we did not find a phone number. So we just drove to the city and convinced the janitor to allow us to get in touch with some workers. Half an hour later we were in their office talking to five or six delegates of the workers about the concept of our film, which they obviously seemed to like. They allowed us to talk to anyone we liked, to stay as long as we wanted, and they invited us for lunch in the factory canteen. They were very proud having a film team from Europe in their factory. By the way, self-management seems to make the procedure of getting in touch with workers and filming much less complicated than it would be in hierarchically structured factories.

TP: While we have focused our discussion on the project and the political ethics that you brought to its production, it is also significant that events around the exhibition project caused a storm of controversy within the art world, coinciding with the resignation of MATRIX curator Chris Gilbert during the exhibition. Can you comment upon those events and perhaps contextualize the place of your work within them?

OR: Chris Gilbert got the job as the MATRIX curator with his proposal to initiate a year of MATRIX exhibitions in 2006 dealing with the political situation in Venezuela. The first in this cycle of exhibitions titled Now-Time Venezuela: Media Along the Path of the Bolivarian Process was our project. Chris’ concept was to produce the exhibitions “in solidarity with Venezuela,” and also to use this phrase. But the former director of the Berkeley Art Museum and some people from the staff and the Board of Trustees wanted a more neutral political positioning of this cycle, and tried to change Chris’s curatorial texts several times. When they saw our installation with revolutionary workers talking about how to take over businesses, I think they still had a hope that maybe the next exhibition would be a little less radical and less direct. This hope of the administration immediately vanished when they read his curatorial text for the second exhibition in the cycle, a wonderful commissioned piece from the alternative TV station Catia TVe in Caracas, which was presented in Berkeley while our exhibition was still on display in the museum. The conflict and mobbing became tougher, and as it is not very effective trying to work in a museum against the museum, Chris decided to resign. His success was that he produced two exhibitions how he wanted them to be, without any compromises. The prize for his thoroughgoingness was that he had to give up his job as MATRIX curator, which he had started only months before; unfortunately, his position within the museum was too weak for him to continue working on the remaining exhibitions of the cycle. His public resignation letter got a lot of attention in the art world internationally. It raised inspiring and controversial questions within progressive art circles about the meaning and potential of formulating a radical critique from the inside of art institutions, which are not politically radical at all.

TP: Now that there is distance of several years on the exhibition itself, I am most interested in understanding the internal political ethics of the work, and the way that work has continuously negotiated its “movement” within the globalized art world, rather than the immediate politics of its debut. You produced the film very much from a position of co-creation and solidarity with its “subjects.” As a final question, I am curious to know if there has been an opportunity to “return” this work to its original site of creation in Venezuela? Has there been any chance for the film’s protagonists, those whose voices it channels, to comment on its conclusion?

OR: Yes, there have been numerous presentations in Venezuela. Even though the two films had been produced primarily for a European or North American audience, there has also been a lot of interest in Venezuela in presenting the films. As Dario is living around half of the year in Caracas, he has also had the chance to organize several screenings. In summer 2006, a big screening was organized of 5 Factories—Worker Control in Venezuela at the Teatro Teresa Carreño in Caracas, and the interviewees from all around Venezuela were invited. A great discussion with the workers took place after the film, which was transcribed in excerpts by Michael Fox for venezuelanalysis.com and can be read on my Web page, www.ressler.at. Usually the film is very well received by the workers. Some people even distribute bootleg DVDs of the films in the black market in Caracas, which obviously means there is a continued interest in watching them.

Ted Purves, Now-Time Venezuela, Part 1: Worker-Controlled Factories, in: Elizabeth Thomas (ed.), Matrix/Berkeley: A Changing Exhibition of Contemporary Art, 2009

Question: How do you select the works for the exhibition you are curating for the current Taipei Biennial? What can be the standard for your choices?

Oliver Ressler: All the invited artists focus in their exhibited works on the so-called counter-globalization movement. They don’t do their work from a neutral perspective, but they are active in the movement or identify with its main goals. In choosing existing videos, photographs, slides or installations from 12 international artists, I tried to cover some of the most important stations of this movement of the movements, which starts with the protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1999, leads over to Prague, Genoa, Buenos Aires, Gleneagles in Scotland, St. Petersburg and then to Heiligendamm in Germany.

Q: Why do you call the counter-globalization movement, “the movement of the movements”?

O.R.: “Counter-globalization movement” is actually a quite strange term, even though most people currently use it. The movement is not against globalization in general; for example, it is for the globalization of human rights, labor rights, indigenous rights or high environmental standards. In addition, this movement appears at these international summits of the World Bank, IMF, WTO or G8. Therefore, this movement is active on a global level and tries to globalize its resistance. The only globalization it definitely counters is the globalization of capitalism, and there are many reasons for that. The term “movement of the movements” refers to a horizontally organized movement of loose groups and individuals with no leaders.

Q: Outside of street protest, what other methods enhance communal understanding?

O.R.: The movement consists of ten thousands of groups and individuals all over the world, and most are active on a local level; for example, in community centers, squats, exchange rings, schools and much more. However, of course, the highest visibility is gained in these international demonstrations, because they occur at events with thousands of journalists from all over the world.

Q: What do you think is a better solution to global issues if Leaders Summit Meetings such as G8 is not considered legitimate for determining global policy?

O.R.: That is a quite a difficult question without a simple answer. The globalized capitalist societies have such a deep political, economic and ecological crises that problems cannot be solved, for example, by simply enlarging the states that define the main shapes of this world from a group of 8 to let’s say 30 states. I think our societies have to be changed in a way that guarantees a much more direct involvement of people in decision-making processes in those aspects that influence their lives. And then, there must be various levels of international meetings, where democratically elected delegates (not representatives) from smaller communities work on shaping the principles of how international relations should be organized. I think the system of representative democracy completely failed; at least how it exists nowadays, which is corrupted through the interests of the economic and political elites.

Q: In your video work “What Would It Mean To Win?” you try to discuss the possibility of using the term “we” in a social movement. What is your attitude to those who have different ideas? Is there a possibility of democracy on a global scale?

O.R.: One exciting thing about participating in an art biennial is that many people from different backgrounds come together. I am very interested in presenting some viewpoints from the movement of the movements; for example, to an audience that is not familiar with these political ideas. In order to make such a movement more influential, it must become much bigger, so it is good to try different strategies to get allies in current and upcoming struggles. Still you have to define a precise border: people with nationalistic, sexist, racist or homophobic viewpoints have to be excluded from any progressive movement.
A real functioning democracy on a global scale would be an ideal thing, but I even doubt that those states usually called democracies are real functioning democracies. Therefore, it will be a long, long struggle until we reach democracy, be it on a national or on a global level.

Q: What is your wish for the New Year?

O.R.: I am not a big fan of wishes… If we want something, we have to fight for it, otherwise it will not happen. The progressive social movements urgently need to get much, much stronger in the next year. It hurts to see that while huge financial crises fundamentally challenge the continuation of business as usual, no strong movement exists to not only criticize or kindly ask governments, but also that would simply force them to reboot this whole corrupt system and to free the way for social movements seeking to create a new system from below. No movement is yet strong enough to hinder nation-states from socializing the financial losses of banks and insurance companies. Unfortunately, in the upcoming decades, all people will have to pay for private financial losses of gamblers.

Marko Stamenkovic: In his most recent project entitled ‘La Buena Vida’ (The Good Life), a New York-based artist Carlos Motta (born 1978 in Colombia) developed a set of interviews that he filmed in the last few years across Latin America. In an attempt to investigate and construct the public opinion on the idea of freedom across the continent of his own origin, Motta travelled to twelve cities all over Latin America during the three-year period (2005-2008): the result of such a nomadic approach is the variety of perceptions on democratic ways of government, as expressed by the citizens – being different by their various professional backgrounds and social statuses. All of them are united at least at one point of concern, that has been fundamental for Motta’s project: they are the subjects belonging to a common territory (of Latin America), whose experience of life has been shaped under the constant interventionist pressures by the United States. In that regard, and instead of giving any direct answer to your question, please let me draw your attention to a statement as formulated in one of the interviews in the project, so I quote it here in the following way: “For Democracy there must be Love”.
Once I heard this sentence, it brought me immediately back to Derrida’s way of thinking: in one of his seminal works about the concept of democracy (The Politics of Friendship), Jacques Derrida approaches the issue of friendship in its analogy with politics. Being aware of the difference between the (apparently marginal) status of friendship in the hierarchy of fundamental political concepts (such as government, sovereignty, or citizenship), Derrida draws back to Montaigne and Aristotle in order to introduce – in a proper way – the figure of the friend onto the contemporary intellectual stage: for him, friendship plays ‘an organising role in the definition of justice, of the political experience, of democracy even.’ This is why, in his addressing of political questions, the concept of friendship has been granted a privilege. And this is also why I want to believe that in the current constellation of powers, the social relations (being always dependent upon many different sources of influence, including the neoliberal economic logic, as you have properly noticed) need to maintain the power of resistance. And this power comes only as a result of hospitality, where the concept of solidarity and mutual accommodation of each others’ viewpoints, long-term trust and sharing of common beliefs and ideals, participate in the processes of silent, but never-ending (either physical or virtual) construction of powers.

Marco Baravalle: Setting a value to social relationships is one of the distinctive characteristics of current capitalism: to it we associate giving value to knowledge, languages, feelings and creativity. Contemporary art is based upon these elements, and one of its priorities could be that of reflecting on the theme of the greediness of capital towards social relationships. It is not a matter of democracy (a term that seems to be getting emptier and emptier in the current crisis panorama, and in need to be refilled with meaning), but it’s about the possibility for art to subvert its production relationships when – as I gather from your question – it shares its own instruments with what we generally address to as cognitive work. The interlocking between contemporary art and cognitive work seems to be not only a viable alternative, but a full of potential one.

Elvira Vannini: I recall two quotes from Godard’s films. The first from ‘Made in U.S.A.’, where Anna Karina says “I have no words to say how much I hate the police”, and the second one from ‘British Sound’, where “more strike, more strike” is often repeated. Is it possible to live in a world of non-parallelisms to gain freedom, despite knowing that democracy is based on parallelisms?

Marco Scotini: Our democracies are rather bizarre objects. Their most ordinary forms are the militarization of the police, the gated communities, the bulletproof cars, the autovelox placed at every second kilometer, the surveillance cameras every square meter, the more and more technologically improved biometric devices of control. As Hobsbawm recently stated, it is a world where the economy, instead of being a provider of mutual services, it is more and more a system of reciprocal inspections. Perhaps only a Martian could see this society as “democratic”.
Let me recall a recent example. Not by chance, it is an example taken from the art system. Hans Ulrich Obrist – for Frieze Art Fair – called upon a series of great artists and intellectuals for a two days Manifesto Marathon, and invited them to rethink the tradition of the modernist manifesto. I mean that tradition which includes even Marx and Engels in its founders. All of this opposite the Serpentine Gallery, under a glass and wooden temporary pavilion, open on all sides – as designed by Frank Gehry – and surrounded by large numbers of bodyguards. The event was far from being a picket of artists and theorists. Rather, it was just another example of security device, of the art’s rule, staged by the new alliance between culture and market!! I believe that only today we can carry on naming ‘democracy’ this progressive convergence of modern democracies and totalitarian states, not by chance, from the biopolitical grounds of contemporary sovereignty, and the fact that the capitalist production sphere has by now extended from the ‘working time’ to the ‘living time’: there is no imaginable outside, no possible exterior. Once Lazzarato affirmed that until 1968 the work was the form of exploitation and surveillance; communication and language assume the same form for today’s capitalism. Thus, the production and circulation of images play a big role in all of this. I would like to add that this role could eventually transform into a freeing function, producing subjectivity. We must agree on what this role can be, though.

Marko Stamenkovic: A Flemish friend of mine told me once (while we were discussing the very same subject somewhere in Antwerp earlier this year): “Don’t be so naïve – resistance is only a word, a phrase on a T-shirt”. I got mad, of course… although I must admit I understand his point of view. But still, let me answer to you: it IS possible to live in such a world – otherwise you could have never posed such a question, and I would have never been able to give you this answer, I guess. The powers I mentioned before are those that belong to the multiplicity of subjects involved in the common efforts (sometimes even without knowing each other, they are capable of recognizing each other); they are the powers taking place at the multiplicity of geopolitical points around the globe, simultaneously and with the same fervor NOT to accept the given, NOT to subscribe to the dominant order (without having a voice to put it explicitly into question), NOT to pretend and NOT to forget. And, of course, NOT to allow oneself to be easily appropriated, ‘adjusted’ and consumed. For me, it is the question of constant nomadism (here understood as a way of being critically engaged with the multiplicity of subjects, places and contexts around the world, as opposed to the ways of being a mere “cosmopolite” urban dweller and traveller, or even worse – a cultural tourist) and also the question of multiplicity (and multi-layered, polyvalent, hyper-engagement on a daily basis), that produce the possibilities for change, within our own fields of interest and our own ways of being – either secluded or extremely open, from time to time, but always persistently present (as even the absence of presence – the shadows, so to say -reveals the power of Potentiality, in Agamben’s terms, for example).

Elvira Vannini: As part of your artist’s practice you organise ‘theme-specific’ exhibitions, with interventions in the public space. You work across a variety of media (video, documentary, inquiries) criticizing capitalist systems and neo-liberal economies, while creating platforms for resistance and offering social alternatives, together with the anti-globalisation movements. If the cultural activities reflect the dominant economic system, is this the right time for an alternative? What’s your point of view on democracy, and how does your art practice intersect it?

Oliver Ressler: Nowadays it is not very special or radical anymore to say that the system of parliamentary democracy does not work in a way that it guarantees a fair involvement in democratic decision-making processes for the masses. It is rather working in favour of the political and economic elites and guarantees that the existing power-relationships and the unfair distribution of wealth are not being questioned. In my opinion, it is essential for progressive political movements not only to criticize the existing capitalist system, but to concentrate on visions for alternatives as well. Even when unfortunately in Europe the progressive social movements are far away from being strong enough to achieve a systemic change, I think at this point it is still very important to discuss different possibilities of how a non-capitalist economy and a more democratic society could be organized. In my project Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies I try to create a kind of archive installation, in which a variety of interesting models and theories for a radical systemic change can be listened to. As the people in their struggles will at some point in the future have to decide through which institutions and structures they would like to replace the capitalist order, it is important for me to present a variety of different concepts and models in my non-hierarchical archive. In the exhibition people get the possibility to choose among several different concepts according to their interests, combine them and make something new on the basis of this new knowledge, and are not being lead to one particular concept, which I chose for them.

Elvira Vannini: The relationship between art practices, resistance movements and activism entails, at a radical level, the production of dissent as a new form of political representation. How can an artist (or a curator) play an active role in the society and in the cultural debate, how can he produce new forms of subjectivity, new leaderships, instances of resistance, and activism? Do you think the definition of a possible space for dissent, and for the initiative of those movements criticizing the economic globalisation, could be achievable? Which is the relationship between artistic practices and social transformation processes? Could you tell me, please, about your experiences?

Marco Scotini: I believe the ‘artist’ has its own radical responsibility. It is amusing to think of a cynical artist, who, for self-defence, follows the commercialization creed despite being aware of its ideological nature. I think this type of artist – a now widespread product of the Eighties – is fundamentally pathetic, as much as those who shield artists from the market, even knowing that the market’s capitalistic economy is extended to all fields, none excluded. It is manifest how both positions intend to protect an archaic version of the artist that no longer can be valid: it would be only a capitalistic mystification of character. I am convinced that nowadays we should no longer talk about the ‘artist’, but think of a collective ‘artistic function’, well familiar to those working on the boundary between art and contemporary activism. Refusing the role of expert, the artist becomes a sort of catalyst, not offering technical solutions, but pointing out the possible way to find them. This constant call to self-organisation, to individual activities, to auto-representation, should now be read in this sense. A sense meeting – in the Foucaultian acception – the production of subjectivities in an era of biopowers, as ours is. It is no longer a matter of creating alternative realities – as Adorno could have thought, when an ‘outside’ was still possible – but production processes alternative per se. A large number of these artists or activists aim to transform the spectators in producers, and to break the existing barrier between the expert creating culture and its passive consumer. At this point, we could observe that Agamben refers also to this, when talking about the ‘desecration of devices’. So, it is not entirely erroneous to think of the ordinary man – of the new subjectivity – as a ‘potential terrorist’ for sovereignty.

Marco Baravalle: There is a multitude of possible answers to this question. My experience is, especially now, strongly connected to the Venetian space S.a.l.e.-Docks: a space entirely dedicated to contemporary art, but started by a group of people with experience in community centres. An experience that we haven’t dismissed: S.a.l.e. is, in fact, part of a network of social spaces, extremely varied in their nature. This offers us a complexity degree still missing in all those spaces that, despite being extremely lively, concentrate their activities only in the artistic or cultural field. This allows to interlock – it is not by chance I am using this word again – our specificity of artistic space at work with the battles and discourses of subjects different from us, but propelled by the same need to create free and communal spaces within the metropolis.

Elvira Vannini: In 2001 you participated in a rally against the World Economic Forum in Salzburg. In the video “This is what democracy looks like!” (2002), you show how this demonstration was stopped by the police, the demonstrators cordoned off, held captive and how the whole event was being manipulated not only by the media, but also by the police and politicians. A critique to globalised capitalism and false democracies, a lucid insight into human right’s violations, collective action and participative phenomena, spontaneously grown out and self-arranged on an international level. A similar critique applies also to your last film, “What Would It Mean To Win?” (2008, with Zanny Begg) on the protests against the G8 summit in Heiligendamm (and earlier “Disobbedienti” with Dario Azzellini in 2002). Marco Scotini talks of a “grey area” between art and politics, moving within which means exposure and activism. In such cases, which are the relationships between art and activism in a perspective of political militancy? Are they interchangeable? How does an artist express himself, and how can he play an active role in the debate about society and in the critical discourse?

Oliver Ressler: I believe it makes a lot sense as an artist to focus on diverse activist practices, for the field of activism and for the field of art. Artist’s videos dealing with activist matters might add some interesting levels of reflection, could be used to address people who are not part of the inner circle of activism, and can inspire and mobilize people in other regions. Activists all over the world frequently present my videos for these or other reasons. The videos also make sense for the field of art, because they politicise it and expand it towards the borders of activisms. My hope is that the reason for the inclusion of political art works in major exhibitions has less to do with the continuous wish of the art system to absorb new things in order to renew itself and legitimize itself through this tendency, than that the majority of those curators who invite political art projects really see the potential to use the space of art as a space for a political debate and action. Therefore I am not so much interested in defining the distinctions between art and activism, but in making a small contribution to dissolve these borders.

Elvira Vannini: Deconstructing histories, politics, institutional historic and artistic narrations: which is the regime of visibility for a so-called ‘political’ exhibition, for example what does Disobedience tell us about how art shows itself nowadays?

Marco Scotini: I believe to think of an art exhibition today with such assumptions means to create platforms for a kaleidoscope of interventions, not recognisable even within the modern genealogy of art. While conjuring a multitude of possible formats, I am convinced contingency, and a precarious arrangement of an archive, could represent one of these platforms. From this point of view we can also understand the deconstruction of the neutrality of the exhibition space, and the narrations accompanying it, as well as the discursive spaces that founded it. Now we have to think of the image as ‘constituent image’, an heterogeneity of images slotting in the corporate media, cropping out from all the fields power penetrates into, beyond any juridical model of known sovereignty. There is a continuous and growing proliferation of this type of images that do not want to be counter-information, do not intend to deconstruct the mainstream imagery, but operate on a different level, intervening directly in the process of auto-production and auto-circulation of the images. The current exhibition should give voice to this pluralism of practices. ‘Disobedience’ is an attempt in this direction.

Elvira Vannini: In the discourse on production systems connected to post-fordist capitalism, Lazzarato locates the potentiality of some artistic practices for the deconstruction of the art system: the means of declaration and distribution of specific roles (the artist, the work, the curator, the viewer) and of the infrastructure of governance (museums, festivals, biennials) that reimpose the concept of property in art (borrowed from processes of capitalistic development). Which is the action field to undermine these power dynamics? In a perspective of political militancy, how can art and activism interweave?

Marco Baravalle: Maurizio Lazzarato highlights a peculiarity in the artistic field. In art, he states, the distribution of specific roles and the governance infrastructure (intended as the molar dimension, according to a definition he borrows from Deleuze and Guattari) are useful elements towards the capitalistic development processes of art itself. This molar dimension should oppose to the molecular one, or the capability of a piece of work, an artist, a critical discourse, to generate new subjectivity, to change the way the spectator looks at himself and at the world. A revolutionary power. You will note that, to clarify the concept of molecular dimension, I have decided to apply molar categories; this because – and here is the important intuition by Lazzarato – when talking about art, the molar dimension and the molecular one cannot be put in a dialectic relationship, as the first is not antithetic to the second, and viceversa. This means that the molecular level, despite remaining effective and maintaining, in the best cases, a truly revolutionary potential, could never mutate the production relationships in the artistic realm. Despite the readymade, the avant-garde, the conceptual, et cetera, art remains a field strongly linked to the concepts of propriety, collecting, luxury, status quo celebration. Which way out can we foresee on the basis of these considerations? It is hard to tell: certainly we are very far from roles disappearance and traditional devices. As I already mentioned before, I believe nowadays it is becoming more and more necessary to highlight similarities between the artist and the cognitive worker as a worker of the contemporary. In the past there has never been a parallel situation, with such a similarity in technologies and (social) instruments between the fields. The effort should be organising and producing political subjectivity out of this similarity. Without nostalgia or a return to the past.

Elvira Vannini: I would like to talk about the section “A World Where Many Worlds Fit” you curated for the Taipei Biennial 2008, which is dedicated to the movements against globalisation. The biennial curated by Vasif Kortun and Manray Hsu was centred on a thematic constellation in response to “the chaotic state of things in the age of globalisation”, examining the very concepts of resistance, neo-liberalism, frontiers and borders, divided countries, war situations, and so on. Thus, “A World Where Many Worlds Fit” is a political exhibition: in this case, what is the format of display? Could you talk about the project for Taipei?

Oliver Ressler: At the beginning of 2008 Vasif and Manray invited me to present some of my videos on the counter-globalization movement in the biennial exhibition, which give some insight into certain aspects of the movement. After a couple of Skype conversations Vasif and Manray expanded the original invitation and asked me to curate a section within the biennial, in which I could invite further artists dealing with the movement of the movements. I liked the idea from the very beginning on, developed a concept and finally chose twelve artists. As it is a global movement, which is in particular visible when the demonstrations or blockades at the summits of the G8, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, or the WTO take place, I decided to focus on these events. The decisions made at these summits affect the lives of all people in the world, but still take place behind fences and thousands of police, that became a symbol for the undemocratic and illegitimate formation of global capitalism. The artists I invited focus on these events from an inner-perspective of the counter-globalization movement. The artists are usually activists themselves and consider themselves as part of the movement.
Through the art works the exhibition ‘A World Where Many Worlds Fit’ makes visible how the strategies of the global movement changed after 911 and the intense level of repression at the G8 summit in Genoa – both incidents took place in 2001 and affected a lot the appearance of the movement in the coming years. Till 2001 a quite masculine, militant concept of direct confrontation with the police seemed to predominate. The crowed tried to gain access into the red zones directly through the police lines. The tactics of resistance somehow became smarter and elaborated over the years. Pink blocks and clowns question these forms of male-dominated direct confrontation with the police, and as the activities against the G8 summits in Heiligendamm and (with less success) Gleneagles proofed, with elaborated, smart concepts such as the ‘five finger tactic’ it is still possible to achieve the same goal – namely to block a summit and create a symbol for the illegitimacy through it.

From: Around Photography 14, 2008