A film by Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler, 19 minutes, 2013

“We can’t imagine a global citizenship or any concept of dynamic citizenship if we don’t think about it not only in terms of law but in terms of the political economy of bodies that move. There have to be structures that can receive and host this kind of movement. This is why citizenship is not simply a subjective phenomenon but also an objective phenomenon of hospitality” – Antonio Negri, The Right of Passage.

In their third collaborative film Zanny Begg (Sydney) and Oliver Ressler (Vienna) focus on struggles to obtain citizenship, while at the same time questioning the implicitly exclusionary nature of the concept.

The Right of Passage is partially constructed through a series of interviews with Ariella Azoulay, Antonio Negri and Sandro Mezzadra. These interviews form the starting point for a discussion in Barcelona, one of Europe’s most densely populated and multicultural cities, with a group of people living “without papers”. The film is set at night, against a city skyline, providing a dark void from which those marginalized and excluded can articulate their own relationship to the arbitrary nature of national identity and citizenship. Spain was chosen for this project as it is teetering on the brink of financial meltdown and is testing the limits of European cohesion.

The title, The Right of Passage, refers to the stages, or “rites of passage” that mark important transitions on the path to selfhood. The exchange of “rites” with “rights” suggests that freedom of movement must become a right granted to every person – regardless of his or her place of birth. As the film explores these journeys not only transform those who embark upon them but also the places they inhabit.

In the film, the conversations around citizenship are interwoven with animated sequences.

Concept, film editing and production: Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler
Passport sequences: Zanny Begg
Camera and interviews: Oliver Ressler
Camera in Barcelona: Carlos Chang Cheng, Roberto Martín
Sound recording: Oliver Ressler
Sound design, mix and color correction: Rudi Gottsberger
Original music: Kate Carr
Participants: Ariella Azoulay, Lucía Egaña, Sandro Mezzadra, Antonio Negri, Daniela Ortiz, Will Sands, Katim Sene, César Zúñiga
Production assistance and translation: Daniela Ortiz, Xose Quiroga, Jason Francis Mc Gimsey
The project was funded partly through a grant of BMUKK and the Australian Council for the Arts Barcelona Residency Program
Many thanks to Gerald Raunig

5-min excerpt from the film

Eine 3-Kanal-Videoinstallation von Oliver Ressler

Die 2011 aufgekommenen Platzbesetzungsbewegungen und die Occupy Bewegung können als eine Reaktion von Menschen gesehen werden, die sich gegen die massive Zunahme gesellschaftlicher Ungleichheiten und den Abbau von Demokratie in Zeiten der globalen Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise zur Wehr setzen. Die Platzbesetzungsbewegungen sind nicht-hierarchisch strukturiert, sie wenden sich gegen jede Art der Repräsentation; ihre Aktivitäten werden auf direkt-demokratische Weise bestimmt. Die Besetzung von öffentlichen Plätzen dient dabei als Katalysator für die Herausbildung von Demonstrationen, Generalstreiks, Versammlungen und Arbeitsgruppen zu unterschiedlichen Schwerpunkten. Erfolgreiche Platzbesetzungen an einem Ort inspirieren oftmals Besetzungen in anderen Städten, ohne dass diese in einem linearen Verhältnis zueinander stehen.

Die 3-Kanal Videoinstallation „Take The Square“ (Besetzt den Platz) basiert auf Gesprächsrunden, die mit AktivistInnen von 15M in Madrid, der Syntagma-Platz-Bewegung in Athen und Occupy Wall Street in New York geführt und gefilmt wurden. In Anlehnung an die bestehenden Arbeitsgruppen der Protestbewegungen diskutieren jeweils vier bis sechs AktivistInnen als Gruppe miteinander. In den Gesprächen geht es um Fragen der Organisierung, horizontale Entscheidungsfindungsprozesse, die Bedeutung und Funktion von Besetzungen öffentlicher Räume und wie gesellschaftlicher Wandel ablaufen kann. Gedreht wurde im Frühling 2012 an jenen Plätzen, die von den Platzbesetzungsbewegungen für Versammlungen und Arbeitsgruppen benutzt werden: Am Plaza de Pontejos, einem ruhigen Platz in unmittelbarer Nachbarschaft zum zentralen Puerta del Sol in Madrid; am Plaza de la Corrala, einem Treffpunkt der Nachbarschaftsversammlung von Lavapiès in Madrid; am Syntagma-Platz, dem zentralen Versammlungs- und Demonstrationsplatz vor dem Parlament in Athen; und im Central Park in New York, wo Occupy Wall Street das „Spring Awakening 2012“ abhielt.

In der insgesamt 88 Min. langen Videoinstallation werden diese Gespräche zwischen AktivistInnen aus drei für die Bewegung zentralen Städten zusammengefügt. „Für mich sind Respekt und Inklusion die sehr mächtigen Mittel, mit denen wir unsere Macht horizontal ausbauen und wiedererlangen, ohne die Notwendigkeit von jemandem, der uns repräsentiert,“ sagt Ayelén von der Kollektiven Nachdenk-Arbeitsgruppe in Madrid. Diese Ablehnung der Repräsentation schließt zumeist auch die Parlamente ein; Menschen sollen politisiert und eingeladen werden, ihr Schicksal selber in die Hand zu nehmen. Babis Magoulas von der Besetzungsbewegung in Athen meint: „Es ist der politische Prozess, aus dem der Mensch hervorgeht, der sich über das Gemeingut Gedanken macht, der partizipiert, der die Politik nicht den ‚Experten’ überlässt, seien sie nun Syndikate oder politische Parteien. Und direkte Demokratie wurde nicht verhängt, sie wurde als einzige Form zusammenzukommen angewandt. Wäre das nicht horizontal verlaufen, hätte es keine Bedeutung.“ Für Jen Waller von Occupy Wall Street entsteht dabei „die erste Bürgerbewegung, die die herrschende Klasse zum Feind erklärt hat“.

„Take The Square“ versucht einen Beitrag zu leisten, das organisatorische Wissen der Bewegungen zu verbreiten und Übersetzungsvorgänge zwischen den Plätzen in Gang zu bringen.

• Regie und Produzent: Oliver Ressler
• Ausführender Produzent: Rudolf Gottsberger | studioROT
• Kamera: Thomas Parb, Rudolf Gottsberger
• Schnitt: Oliver Ressler
• Sounddesign, Tonmischung und Farbkorrektur: Rudolf Gottsberger
• TeilnehmerInnen der Nachbarschaftsversammlung von Lavapiés in Madrid: Adolfo Estalella, Lucía Gutiérrez, Ernesto García López, Héctor Pojomovsky, Martha Viniegra
• TeilnehmerInnen der Kollektiven Nachdenk-Arbeitsgruppe in Madrid: Amador, Álvaro, Ayelén, David, Kiara, Rodrigo
• TeilnehmerInnen der Diskussionsgruppe am Syntagma Platz in Athen: Christos Giovanopoulos, Leonidas Kaportsis, Stasa Kotara, Babis Magoulas, Spyros Niakas, Reggina Zervou
• TeilnehmerInnen der Diskussionsgruppe im Central Park in New York: Nicole Carty, Austin Guest, George Machado, Jen Waller
• TeilnehmerInnen am Workshop in New York: Nicole Carty, Austin Guest, Zak Solomon, Danny Valdes
• Übersetzungen für englische Untertitel: Cora Sueldo, Héctor Pojomovsky, Martha Viniegra, Giannis Papadimitriou, Alexandros Papageorgiou
• Übersetzung für deutsche Untertitel: Colette Schmidt
• Produktionsassistenz: Katarzyna Winiecka und Rafael Sánchez Mateos (Madrid), Giannis Papadimitriou (Athen), Maren Richter (New York)
• Besonderer Dank gilt Maren Richter (künstlerische Direktorin der REGIONALE12), Vasilis Alexakis, Dario Azzellini, Enrique García Camarero, Raquel Garcia Carrillo, Beka Economopoulos, Marcelo Expósito, Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Elisabeth Lorenzi, Carlos Motta, Alan W. Moore, Marina Sitrin, Aitor Tinoco i Girona, Nato Thompson
• Förderungen: REGIONALE12, Cine Art

4-minütiger Ausschnitt aus der Videoinstallation (Athen)

Der Film „Robbery“ (Raub) verknüpft die bei sozialen Unruhen sich ereignenden Plünderungen von Geschäften, wie sie etwas in Großbritannien im August 2011 stattfanden, mit den Plünderungen der Staatskassen, die Regierungen zahlreicher Staaten seit 2008 zur Rettung der Banken und der Wirtschaft unternommen haben. Ermöglichte die Rettung der Banken die Ausschüttung von Boni und Dividenden an Manager und Aktionäre, sollen im Gegenzug die dadurch gestiegenen Budgetdefizite der Staaten durch Sparmaßnahmen bei den 99 % abgebaut werden – was die soziale Ungleichheit weiter vergrößert. Die Plünderung von Geschäften durch verarmte Unterschichtsjugendliche (nighttime robbery) steht daher in einer ursächlichen Verbindung mit der Plünderung der Staatskassen und dem Abbau sozialer Sicherungssysteme durch die herrschenden Eliten (daytime robbery).

Konzept, Schnitt, Produktion: Oliver Ressler
Fotografien: Olivia Harris/Reuters, Trago/Getty Images

Ein Film von Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler, 24 Min., 2012

„Wenn du z.B. in eine überfüllte U-Bahn gehst und sagst: ‚Ich werde mich in die Luft sprengen’ und jemanden um Geld erpresst, findest du wahrscheinlich Leute, die eine Menge Geld dafür bezahlen, dass du dich nicht in die Luft sprengst. Die Banken […] liefen in der Tat die ganze Zeit wie lebende Zeitbomben durch die Gegend.” Yves Smith, „The Bull Laid Bear”

Im zweiten gemeinsamen Film von Zanny Begg (Sydney) und Oliver Ressler (Wien) geht es um die Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise nach 2008. „The Bull Laid Bear“ legt die ökonomische Rezession (Bear Market) offen, die sich hinter Phasen anhaltender Kursgewinne (Bull Markets) verbirgt. Der Film macht sich über einige Rechtfertigungen für Bankenrettungen und Sparpakete lustig und untersucht, wie es Regierungen in den Vereinigten Staaten und anderen Staaten wie Irland gelang, eine Bankenkrise in eine Haushaltskrise zu transformieren.

„The Bull Laid Bear“ basiert auf einer Reihe von Interviews mit US-ÖkonomInnen und AktivistInnen, wie William K. Black, einem Kriminologen für Wirtschaftsverbrechen; Yves Smith, der Autorin des Blogs „Naked Capitalism“; Tiffiniy Cheng, Koordinatorin der Kampagne „A New Way Forward“ und dem Co-Direktor des wirtschaftspolitischen Forschungsinstituts in Amherst, MA, Gerald Epstein. Das Material dieser vier Interviews wurde mit handgezeichneten Animationen verwoben, um eine scheinbar fiktive kriminelle Welt von Gangster-Bänkern und korrupten Gerichten zu zeigen.

Die Performerin Singing Sadie stellt den Soundtrack für den Film und singt eine zeitgenössische Neuinterpretation von Billie Holidays anklagendem Klassiker „God Bless The Child“.

„The Bull Laid Bear“ hinterfragt unseren kollektiven Glauben an die Finanzmärkte, versucht die Verantwortlichen für die Finanzkrise 2008 ausfindig zu machen und beschäftigt sich mit der zunehmenden wirtschaftlichen Krise in Europa.

Konzept, Schnitt, Produktion: Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler
Animation und Zeichnungen: Zanny Begg
Interviews und Kamera: Oliver Ressler
Musik: Singing Sadie
Klavier: Mick Hana
Weitere Musik: Captain Ahab
Kamera Singing Sadie: Arunas Klupsas
Sound Singing Sadie: Jon Hunter
Ton- und Bildbearbeitung: Rudi Gottsberger
Herzlichen Dank an Nancy Folbre, Brian Holmes, Jon Hunter, Pascal Jurt, Arunas Klupsas und Singing Sadie.
Förderungen: Kulturamt der Steiermärkischen Landesregierung; New Work Grant, Australia Council for the Visual Arts

6-minütiger Ausschnitt aus dem Film

Das Projekt „Resist to Exist“ besteht aus zwei Elementen, die nebeneinander in Sichtweite von der S-Bahn Station Bispebjerg in Kopenhagen präsentiert werden.

Das erste Element der Intervention ist ein freistehendes Plakat der Größe 366 x 244 cm, das ein fotografisches Bild von eingezäunten Containern des Schifffahrts- und Erölkonzerns Maersk zeigt. Maersk ist der größte dänische Konzern und der weltweit größte Betreiber von Container-Schifffahrt. Container sind maßgeblich für den Transport von Waren rund um den Globus und daher unabdingbar für die Aufrechterhaltung des kapitalistischen Weltmarkts. Große Teile des Zauns auf dem Bild sind zerstört, als ob sie in einer Aufruhr herausgebrochen wurden.

Dieses Plakat wird durch einen 12 Meter langen Zaun ergänzt, der in der Nähe des Plakats platziert wurde. Es scheint der auf dem Plakat abgebildete herausgebrochene Zaun zu sein. Der Zaun wurde mit Betonblöcken unterlegt, so dass er ein bisschen höher als das Bodenniveau ist. Diese metallene Struktur kann als Rost für einen großen Grill benutzt werden, der der Öffentlichkeit frei zugänglich gemacht wird. Der Zaun, der kürzlich noch die Grenze zwischen einem transnationalen Konzern und der Öffentlichkeit bestimmte, wurde in etwas Gemeinsames („Commons“) transformiert – in etwas Erfreuliches, Praktisches und Sinnvolles, wo Menschen zusammentreffen können. Es entsteht das Bild der Enteignung der „Republik des Eigentums“ durch die „Multitude der Armen“, die „im Zentrum des Projekts der revolutionären Transformation“ auftritt[1].

Nach dem Sozialwissenschaftler David Harvey sei es die zentrale Errungenschaft des Neoliberalismus gewesen, Reichtum und Einkommen umzuverteilen, und nicht zu generieren. In dieser „Akkumulation durch Enteignung“ wird bestehender Reichtum von transnationalen Konzernen überall auf der Welt in Besitz genommen, üblicherweise den Armen oder dem öffentlichen Sektor entzogen, mit legalen oder illegalen Mitteln, zumeist aber in Situationen, in denen die Grenzen der Legalität nicht eindeutig zu bestimmen sind.[2] Das Plakat imaginiert die Wiederaneignung dieses ehemals enteigneten Reichtums, einen Versuch, ihn wieder zurückzugewinnen.

Das Projekt „Resist to Exist“ wendet Aktivitäten an, die die ProtagonistInnen sozialer Bewegungen wie die Piqueteros in den Aufständen während der Krise in Argentinien 2001 praktiziert haben. Für sie wurde das Zerstören von Zäunen und deren Wiederverwendung als Gerätschaften, um Essen zuzubereiten, zu einem Akt des Überlebens. Um zu existieren, wurden die Grenzen zu dem, was als unverrückbar schien, aufgebrochen.

Das Projekt in Kopenhagen findet auf einem ehemaligen Bahnareal statt, das die AnwohnerInnen zwischen 2002 und 2007 in einen Park (mit Grillstellen) und Kultureinrichtungen entsprechend ihrer Bedürfnisse zu transferieren versuchten; aber ihre Anliegen wurden von der Stadtverwaltung nicht berücksichtigt. Das Areal grenzt außerdem an das Føtex Einkaufszentrum an, eines von vielen Tochterunternehmen von Maersk.

„Resist to Exist“ verfolgt die Frage, ob eine aktivistische Praxis, die in einer bestimmten historischen Situation zur Anwendung kam, neue Relevanz in der momentanen Situation erhalten kann, in der nicht ein einzelner Staat, sondern das gesamte kapitalistische System in der Krise steckt.

Das Projekt wird vom 30. Juli, an dem es mit einem gratis Grillessen um 15:00 Uhr eröffnen wird, bis zum 21. August 2011 stattfinden. In diesem Zeitraum ist es rund um die Uhr für Treffen und als Grillplatz zugänglich.

Das Projekt wurde während einer artist’s residency bei ANA – Astrid Noacks Atelier in Kopenhagen im Juli 2011 durchgeführt und von Statens Kunstråd, Nørrebro Lokaludvalg und BM:UKK unterstützt.

Credits: Kirsten Dufour (ANA, YNKB), Katrine Skovgaard (ANA), Biba Fibiger, Andreas Lykke Jensen, Inger Kærgaard, John Jordan, Bjørn O. und Katarzyna Winiecka.

Videodokumentation: Kamera: Katarzyna Winiecka, Kirsten Dufour; Fotografin des vandalisierten Ortes: Inger Kærgaard; Musik, Sounddesign & Schnitt: Rudi Gottsberger

„We have a situation here“ ist ein Standardsatz, mit dem im Katastrophenfilm ein Darsteller ein herausforderndes Szenario einleitet. Das Szenario auf den drei Fotografien zeigt übereinander liegende Menschen, die durch ihre Kleidung als Manager, Polizisten und Soldaten erkennbar sind.

Die Haufen von Managern, Polizisten und Soldaten vermitteln den Eindruck eines Nicht-Mehr-Gebraucht-Werdens dieser zentralen Akteure der Ausübung von Herrschaft. Ihr Spiel ist zu Ende.
Manager großer Konzerne machen seit Jahrzehnten ihren Einfluss geltend, die globale Ökonomie zum Vorteil ihrer Unternehmen und auf Kosten von Umwelt-, Sozial- und Arbeitsstandards umzubauen, wodurch ganze Regionen in Armut versinken. „Das Verbrechen ist kein Auswuchs mehr, der sich am Rand der legalen ökonomischen Aktivität abspielt, sondern es ist die grundlegende Aktivität des postindustriellen Wirtschaftssystems, innerhalb dessen die kulturellen und ethischen Verankerungen der traditionellen Bourgeoisie abhanden gekommen sind“, schreibt der italienische Philosoph Franco Berardi Bifo (1). Spätestens seit der Krise 2008 – und wie diese von den Eliten gemanagt wird – verlieren die Menschen auch im Zentrum des Kapitalismus massiv an Vertrauen in das Gesellschaftssystem und dessen RepräsentantInnen. Laut einer von Polis/Sinus für die SPD-nahe Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung durchgeführten Umfrage zweifelt mittlerweile jeder dritte deutsche Staatsbürger an der Effizienz der repräsentativen Demokratie. (2)
Trotzdem, oder gerade deswegen, bleibt es die primäre Funktion der Polizei, die öffentliche Sicherheit und Ordnung aufrecht zu erhalten, was nichts anderes bedeutet, als die bestehenden Herrschaftsverhältnisse abzusichern und jegliche Bestrebung nach Transformation zunichte zu machen. „Wenn Herrschaft immer ein Prozess bewaffneten Raubs ist, dann besteht die Eigenart des Kapitalismus darin, dass die bewaffnete Person neben der Person steht, die den Diebstahl begeht, und nur überwacht, dass der Raub in Übereinstimmung mit dem Gesetz durchgeführt wird“, meint John Holloway. (3)
Dem Militär kommt die Funktion zu, die globalen Herrschaftsverhältnisse nach Außen hin abzusichern, von der Sicherung der Rohstoffversorgung, die sich oft direkt gegen die Interessen der Mehrheit der in den rohstoffreichen Staaten lebenden Menschen richtet, bis zur Umsetzung von Abschottungspolitiken.

In den drei Fotografien „We Have a Situation Here“ liegen Manager, Polizei und Militär danieder. Die bestehende Ordnung gerät ins Wanken, die Gedanken nehmen einen freien Lauf:
Ist eine Gesellschaft ohne Manager, Polizei oder Militär vorstellbar, und wenn, auch wünschenswert?
Kann die Position des Managers wieder auf das simple Verwalten einer Firma zurückgestutzt werden, mit der keine sonderliche Macht über andere Menschen verbunden ist?
Ist ein Neustart der Wirtschaft und ihre Unterordnung unter die Interessen der Mehrheit der Bevölkerung vorstellbar?
Kann die Etablierung neuer Ordnungsorgane, die direkt von den Menschen eingesetzt und demokratisch von diesen kontrolliert werden, funktionieren?
Woher soll das notwendige Personal für einen gesellschaftlichen Umbau kommen?

Diese und ganz andere Fragen können durch die drei Fotografien ausgelöst werden, die auf einer zentralen Gebäudefassade in der Innenstadt in Novi Sad (Trg Slobode 4) als großformatige Digitaldrucke installiert sind.

Im Rahmen des Projekts „…by the way…“ im Museum für zeitgenössische Kunst der Vojvodina und im öffentlichen Raum in Novi Sad (Serbien)

Fotografin: Anja Manfredi
Unterstützung: Institut für Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Steiermark; Artra Galleria, Mailand; Kunstraum Bernsteiner, Wien

Anmerkungen
(1) Franco Berardi Bifo, Arbeit Wissen Prekarität, Kulturrisse 02/2005
(2) Florian Rötzer, Demokratie überzeugt nicht mehr, Telepolis, 30.06.2008,
(3) John Holloway, Die Welt verändern ohne die Macht zu übernehmen, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2004, S. 46

Im Rahmen von „Nach Demokratie“ im Kunstraum Niederösterreich

„Too big to fail“ – so schätzen PolitikerInnen in Zeiten der Wirtschaftskrise Banken ein und versuchen damit, die Rettung der Banken mittels öffentlicher Gelder zu rechtfertigen. Denn die Banken sind „systemrelevant“; geht es ihnen schlecht, so ist das kapitalistische System bedroht.

In der Arbeit „Too Big to Fail“ werden die vier Worte „too big to fail“ auf der 16,85 Meter langen Wand des Kunstraum Niederösterreich installiert. Die Buchstaben des Textes sind aus einem Foto gebildet, das Menschen auf einer Demonstration zeigt. Es stammt von einer der Demonstrationen, die unter dem Motto „Wir zahlen nicht für eure Krise“ am 28. März 2009 in zahlreichen Städten stattgefunden haben. Mit diesen Demonstrationen wurde die massive Umverteilung von öffentlichem Eigentum von unten nach oben abgelehnt, wie es die Nationalstaaten im Zuge der angeblichen Krisenbekämpfung praktizieren. Während die Banken mit Milliarden überschüttet werden, wird bei der Allgemeinheit umso kräftiger gespart. Im Gegensatz zu Banken werden Menschen in Armut nicht gerettet. Ihr Elend und ihre Unzufriedenheit bedrohen das System nicht.

„Too Big to Fail“ fasst den Wunsch in ein Bild, dass die globalen Bewegungen für eine demokratische Transformation „systemrelevant“ und ein nicht mehr zu ignorierender Akteur werden.

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