Elections (RO) and other crisis through artworks
“Against the law, my body tries to influence the general affective atmosphere of today's elections. The main intention is to tilt the balance towards peace and against the warmongers candidates (most of them). The feeling is that somehow my affective body is expanding, entering the minds and the bodies of the voters, peace orienting them, calming the war frenzy. Now the strange movements and sensibility in my body affect way beyond the Romanian elections, extending to Ukraine, Palestine, and other conflicts that are happening now, towards everyone war responsible, the Military Complex and the warmongers everywhere.
Of course, it crosses my mind that this is just my imagination, that I'm deluding myself. But now because you read this, it might enter yours too. Yet, it's also an embodied experience, my body somehow operates on the sensible fabric of reality / the collective unconscious / the Dreaming that shapes the world. The actual feeling is of a vague affective flow around me, modulated towards love and peace. Now my body just entered into some sharp violent, contorted movements, like fighting, kicking and cutting war oriented intentions, actions and people – a war against war. I feel that indeed, it might be possible that with a small grain of faith you can move mountains. My belief is definitely smaller than that, but is growing through practice, through experience. Experience creates faith and the faith is enlarging the experience…” (note from Political Sorcery, November 24, Somn Bucharest)
“15 years ago we, Postspectacle / The Candidate, were trying to run for the presidency of Romania. The necessary 200k signatures were prohibitively unreachable but we went ahead with our campaign for a while. Our slogan “Give up Hope!” was totally alien – the elections were relatively tamed back then, more stable and “normal”. Not so much now. Probably because the world slowly disintegrates (peak resources, mass extinction, ecocide, multiple crises and wars), the elections become stranger and stranger everywhere. It's like the foundations, the implicit certitudes that shape the world, are becoming unstable and everything can be questioned – modernity, progress, secularism, centrality of economy, of science – experiments and aberrations are proposed. Like in other parts of the world, in Romania there is now a radical polarization, a cultural war. Each side sees the other as a total catastrophe. One side is seen as having a crazy candidate who mixes politics and religion, saying some wild stuff, he's also perceived as “pro-Russian” for wanting to stop the military aid to Ukraine and campaigning for peace. From the other side, the other candidate is seen as a stupid warmonger puppet of the “Military Complex” pushing towards war in the same way as under the “Big Pharma” influence she and her party were pushing a very corrupt, harsh and unconstitutional covid regime. Each side is full of fear and hate, and is perceiving itself as the only hope for avoiding disaster. And from each side the other can be voted only by idiots. As an experiment, I can actually pendulate between the two perspectives, going from being one type of “idiot” to the next, and I can feel the fears and hopes of both sides. In the beginning is mostly fear, but when I establish myself in a perspective, hope also starts to grow, together with the hate and disgust for the other side. After pendulating between the two incompatible perspectives for a while, a third one emerges, a meta-perspective from which this almost civil war between opposing fears and hopes feels very sad and scary. Give up hope!” (note from Vague Retrospective, Nov 25)
“The sensation of hanging in an unstable hammock close to the very high ceiling at DEPO Istanbul in 2013 came into my body. We were 6 artist friends, in hammocks hanging between 6 pillars that we painted in gold, above the visitors who came for our exhibition End Pit opening. We were debating abstractly and relaxed the relationship between art and politics, while huge protests against Erdogan regime were happening nearby in the city (me and Alina were often joining them during our residency there). The performative work was supposed to comment also on the art's lack of real political power. To my surprise, the situation made me go against the plan and come up with fresh, unexpected ideas about the relationship between what we were doing, what was happening in the city, and art in general. Somehow that strange context and its performativity was pushing me to really think, to explore new nuances and ideas, to move beyond what I “knew” as art - politics relationship. At that time I was very critical about institutionalized art, but the event took me by surprise, sabotaging my intention of portraying art as pretentiously removed from politics and reality, feeling that actually there was some strange value and poetic effectiveness in what we were doing there, above the things. Afterwards some visitors asked me if I'm a philosopher.” (note from Vague Retrospective, November 21)
“The calming mood of the shelter made me aware of the fear I've had in my chest for some time. My chest is warming up, fear eases slightly. Multiple fears are still pressing on the shelter. Fear of war – many international analysts say that elections were blocked by NATO and Military Complex because the pro-peace candidate was winning. Fear of dictatorship, because of how dubious and totalitarian the voting and democracy got canceled. Fear that the big changes proposed by the pro-peace candidate could lead to panic and instability, like now. Fear of “fascism”, he is portrayed like that by the media based on some affirmations and people he met. Fear of media and influencers, because they aim to shock, exaggerate, distort, lie, demonize, fomenting fear and hate. Fear of “fascism” on the other side because this powerful propaganda produces a fanatical frenzy of fear and hate like in covid times when a scared fundamentalist crowd was pushing for extremely discriminatory and totalitarian measures on the unconvinced. Fear of civil war because demonization produces resistance and a dangerous polarization in society, pushing people to extremes. Fear of being attacked or canceled, people are very radicalized and perceive any nuanced or deeper reflection as treason, having a different perspective can make you a despicable enemy. The shelter still has some calming effect, protecting a little from this heavy psycho-atmosphere, but it feels like the flimsy shelter that they build in Melancholia movie for a bit of calm before the catastrophic collision with another planet. I deactivated airplane mode and a lot of fear entered the shelter via phone notifications, spoiling the calm. Shelters should block the internet too because a lot of the fear&hate atmosphere comes from there. I could have been in a voting booth now, but elections were canceled and here I am in this shelter, having my moment of calm before going back online to add my part to all this craziness.” (note from Shelters, December 8, Somn Bucharest)
“All the problems, wars, precarity, migrations, crises, come from the current process of resources depletion, mass extinction, ecocide, of terminating nature. This would be the moment to question the foundations, the implicit certainties that shape our collapsing world – modernity, progress, secularism, materialism, centrality of economy, of science. But, the process of increasing exploitation of people and nature for economic growth damages also the interior nature, producing an emptiness, a vacuum, an affective desert, a lack of meaning and sensibility, radically attacking the human form and social relations, and greatly diminishing the possibilities of real questioning and meaningful response.
You would expect deep questioning and reconsidering to happen at least in art, but the art world seems to be in deep denial, most of the artists protecting the system's enabling certitudes – the acceptable explorations are within modernity, progress, rationalism, materialism, scientific paradigms. Insociety’s recent important and dividing events, artists were almost unanimous with the system, defending official narratives, attacking and canceling those with different perspectives. Instead of exploring and creating new forms of seeing, thinking, feeling and doing, the art world mostly reinforces conformism to default worldviews.
In this environment if you want to operate on the deep certainties, on the bases of the current realities, you will probably deviate too much from what could be perceived as interesting art, from what is now in, and you can be seen as irrelevant or not seen at all. In this situation, more than trying to criticize and fight the system, my response was the creation of parallel art ecosystems, of artworks as “artworlds”. The first one was Postspectacle in which with Ion Dumitrescu we tried to test the certainties behind the current generalized spectacle. Next, in Unsorcery, with Alina Popa we tried to operate on those deep certainties, to affect the current (capitalist) sorcery that creates reality. Now it's Artwork, a meta-artwork as artworld which collects from different works ways of seeing, feeling and doing that have the potential of structurally affecting reality.” (Artwork note, December 15)
“My body turns around doing the necessary moves and adjustments for maintaining a light affective connection with the world around. A world in turmoil. In Romania big fears are floating around – fear of war, of the surprise candidate, of entering a Military Complex dictatorship, of economic collapse… Everyday something new emerges, changing the narratives. Today they found the “Russian interference”, it is actually the Romanian party of the president, the ones who stopped the elections. Probably because I mentioned fears, my body entered a light fear state. My skin is touched by fears. The fears come via the outside darkness which is somehow charged with the fearful political atmosphere. Dark fear currents pass through my body which from time to time enters protective poses. Poses that amplify the fear. Now fear is more like an abstract affect that opens my body and my perception – like a preparation for wild things to come, for the future. My body slid into an angry mood. The movements are sending rage energies to the political forces who produce this fearful psycho-atmosphere, locally but also internationally. It attacks the Military Complex who profit from it and all the corrupt necropoliticians, the warmongers from press and politics who push the war narrative and ignore the will for peace. Sharp, violent moves and energies come from my body. Now my body entered again a hypersensible mood. It slowly turns around and enters love-charged postures, it emanates peace. Another shift, the movements are confused now, like it doesn't know anymore what to do, what to see, what to think. What? Where? How? When? Why? The objects in the room are peculiar, abstract strange presences. My concerns about politics are becoming very confused and peculiar too. They seem ridiculous, I'm even smiling writing this. I don't know anything anymore. From these confused postures and states my previous affective activism seems unnecessary. The only meaningful thing would be to spread this unknowing. We know too much who, where, what, how and why, and this closes our bodies, our minds and our societies in dogmatic unthinking and fundamentalism. I start to be too smart here, to know much too much again. My body returns to the unknowing confusion. Writing this doesn't make sense anymore.” (note from Unexperiences, December 21)
“After lying down and waiting for a while, soft invisible healing forces start acting on my body, as usually happens with this practice. Especially on my face this time, relaxing it. I became aware of the normalized tension there and its connection with my headache and stomach unease. The tension feels like a good expression for the year that is ending in a few minutes. In the last months there was a lot of political stress in Romania, a very fear charged atmosphere, authoritarian cancelation of the elections, increased war propaganda, and, what scared me the most, a fundamentalist frenzy in the artistic and intellectual environments, a frenetic embrace and protection of the main narrative – as on covid politics or the Ukraine war, nuances, doubts, other perspectives were attacked with irrational aggression and disgust. The healing forces are extending to my forehead now. Something is opening up. The headache melts away. I imagine how this calm healing extends to the entire city, region, world. Who knows, maybe the affecting works both ways, if the diseased political atmosphere can sicken my body, maybe its healing reverberates back affecting something in the world too.” (You Are, December 31)
“The need for certitudes, for comforting, stable knowledge is at the center of many political, social and personal problems. In politics, the ideologies about how the world works and about what should be done create fundamentalisms. In medicine, materialism and the idea of anatomic, medical body creates dangerous reductionisms. The clear knowledge about what is and how it should be done closes the possible in art. The political, scientific and personal truths are always in revision or radical change, yet almost everyone behaves like they are atemporal, ultimate truths. The need for certitudes leads to reductionisms, to reliance on schematic, rigid and conformist images of the world. The most revolutionary gesture is not to replace a paradigm with another, an ideology to another, or one certitude to another, but to admit that you don't know, to exist in unknown instead of known. To be capable to entertain incompatible perspectives, to function in uncertainty, to admit being unstable, nomad, partial, provisory. When we make unknowing our practice and admit that we don't know how to do art, politics, or life, the body might open and become sensible. Reality and the posibile too. (Artwork note, January 9)