“We have a situation here” is a standard line in disaster films when an actor faces a challenging situation. The three photographs show people lying on top of each other and recognizably dressed as managers, police and soldiers.
The piles of managers, police officers and soldiers give the impression that these central players in the exercise of power are no longer necessary. Their game is over.

Managers of large corporations have for decades used their influence in the global economy to benefit their companies at the expense of environmental, social and labor standards and, as a result, entire regions have sank into poverty. “Criminality is no longer something that takes place at the margin of legal economic activity, but it is the basic activity of the post-industrial economic system, within which the traditional bourgeoisie have lost their cultural and ethical moorings,” writes Italian philosopher Franco Berardi Bifo (1). At least since the 2008 crisis – and because of the way the elites have managed it – people in the center of capitalism have overwhelmingly lost confidence in the social system and its representatives. According to a Polis/Sinus survey for the SPD-affiliated Friedrich Ebert Foundation, one in three German citizens doubts the effectiveness of representative democracy. (2)
Nevertheless the primary function of police remains maintaining public security and order; this means nothing else than to protect existing power relations, and destroy any effort for transformation. “If domination is always a process of armed robbery, the peculiarity of capitalism is that the person with the arms stands apart from the person doing the robbery, merely supervising that the robbery conforms with the law,” argues John Holloway. (3)
The military has the function of securing the global relations of power, which ranges from implementing the politics of exclusion up to securing the international supply of raw materials, often acting directly against the interests of the majority of the people living in resource-rich countries.

In the three photographs “We Have a Situation Here”, managers, police and military lie among each other. The existing order is faltering, ideas run free:
Is a society imaginable, even desirable, without managers, police or military?
Can the position of the manager be reduced again to the simple management of a firm, without a connection to particular power over other people?
Is it possible to imagine a restart of the economy and its subordination to the interests of the majority of the population?
Would it work to establish a new security system employed directly by the people and democratically controlled?
Where can  the personnel necessary for social transformation be found?

These and completely other questions can be raised by the three photographs installed as large format digital prints on a central building facade in the city center of Novi Sad (Trg Slobode 4).

In the framework of the project “…by the way…” at Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina and public space in Novi Sad (Serbia)

Photographer: Anja Manfredi
Support: Institut für Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Steiermark; Artra Galleria, Milan; Kunstraum Bernsteiner, Vienna

Notes:
(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 (Change the World Without Taking Power), Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2004, p. 46

“Globalizing Protest” is an ongoing series of photographic montages consisting of images shot in inner cities during protests against the G8. Each photographic montage is based on 36 single images that document the wooden barricades protecting the shop windows erected during various G8 summit meetings, which activists use for graffiti, political texts, and slogans. Three photo works of this series have been produced: “Untitled (Geneva 03.06.03)” was shot during the G8 summit in Geneva 2003, “Untitled (Edinburgh, 7/2005)” at the G8 summit in Scotland in 2005, and “Untitled (Rostock 6/2007)” during the recent G8 summit in Heiligendamm in Germany in 2007.

“With photographs showing shopping windows protected with wooden desks, which turned out to become an endless plateaux for the demonstration’s texts, graffiti and images and sometimes combined with the signs and names of global companies still visible outside the wooden desks, we can see how the incoherency of space and contingency of time enables the disclosure of the common. What is interesting here is exactly the mixture of spatial incoherency and contingency of time of the common, which revealed a completely different mapping of the city streets, movements, languages of the city, parallel spatial meanings. What holds these images together is not the common goal, not even the common meaning, but the alternative production of language with by taking the space and opening up the time. The common appearance is made explicit, this is “the spectacle of appearance” as Hannah Arendt would say. The spectacle is spatially incoherent as a consequence (it is namely done as a protection nevertheless establishing plateaux for momentarily spatial appropriation) and contingent in the sense of making the common explicit not as a program, but as a response to the momentarily urgency of appearance.” (Bojana Kunst, The Collaboration and Space, Moscow Art Magazine No. 61/62, 2006)

“Ressler’s photograph is without action(s), but a site of a precise textuality, and a possible answer to questions about the difference between mainstream journalism, big capital, the power elite and mediactivism. […] An objective camera eye simply does not exist, which is why the camera angle in Ressler’s works blends with the perspective of the demonstrators. As viewers we are in direct relation to the events by seeing them through the demonstrators’ viewpoint. The place of the image of vision and its reversal are crucial. And as regards the image of vision, it is more important to include the third element between the body and that image, namely power. This is why it is necessary to look at Ressler’s works through the only possible perspectives that are non-essentialism and a strict anti-documentary positioning of reality.” (Marina Grzinic and Walter Seidl, Double Check. Re-Framing Space in Photography: The Other Space, Parallel Histories. 2005)

The size of each of the three photo works is 140 x 105 cm.