Could art help to change the world at the copehagen summit?

Protest has always required a creative streak, from the varied tactics of the suffragettes to the fancy dress antics of fathers for justice, but in recent times the nature of it has changed significantly, bring much of it closer to art. For me this new creativity has brought new life to many movements and given me hope that they can affect real change.

But with the possibly world saving (or destroying), Copenhagen summit looming, i wonder wether this fresh breeze will be enough to push for the creation of meaningful treaty. The newspapers give us a constant stream of reporting that trys to prepare us for the worst, but i can't help feel a rush of optimism when i hear whispers of plans from groups like Climate justice action and Climate camp.

In light of these inspiring movements, projects and people i will be traveling to copenhagen in december with my own little project brewing. I've been amazed by the increasing amount of passion there is around the issue of climate change, over the last few years i have seen more and more people (as well as myself), wake up to the realities of what is going on. What is even more amazing to me is the passion with which it is talked about and the obvious urge to do something about it.

I have realised however, that the very place where this passion is needed (in Copenhagen), is a logistical impossibility to many people, due to the amount of time, money and organisation needed to get there. This has really pushed me to try to give these views a platform and to try to stop people becoming alienated from what is going on at the conference.

To do this i will travel to Copenhagen over the weekend of the 11th, armed with an iphone connected to a recently started blog (positiveflight.wordpress.com), full of your messages to the world leaders, i will then get your messages seen, heard or even felt by a method of your choosing (i've had a good few ideas as well).

So.... go along to www.positiveflight.wordpress.com to give me your messages and ideas, or to find out more about the project.

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Towards a police State

On the 4 December T. Hammarberg, the European Commissioner for Human Rights, presented the Council of Europe with a report on surveillance and Human Rights in the Europe post 9/11. Entitled “Protecting the Right to Privacy in the Fight Against Terrorism,” the report takes very important (even if already obvious for many of us) conclusions on the dangers of the current tactics employed to fight terrorism:

We are rapidly becoming a ‘Surveillance Society.’ This is partly the result of general technical and societal developments, but these trends are strongly reinforced by measures taken in the fight against terrorism.

In the context of the fight against terrorism, this means individuals are at the risk of being targeted for being suspected ‘extremists’ or for being suspected of being ‘opposed to our constitutional legal order,’ even if they have not (yet) committed any criminal (let alone terrorist) offence.

‘Targets’ of this kind are moreover increasingly selected through computer ‘profiles.’ Even if some may be caught, there will always be relatively large number of ‘false negatives’ - real terrorists who are not identified as such, and unacceptably high numbers of ‘false positives’: large numbers of innocent people who are subjected to surveillance, harassment, discrimination, arrest - or worse. Freedom is being given up without gaining security.

(...)

In the process, all of us are increasingly placed under general, mass surveillance, with date being captured on all our activities, on-line or in the ‘real’ world. Such general surveillance raises serious democratic problems which are not answered by the repeated assertion that "those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear."


Now as I said before, this conclusions bring no news to those of us who have since the beginning been concerned with the terrifying dissemination of surveillance systems through the fabric of our everyday lives. Still the point that I think its worth stressing in the conclusions of this report is the fact that the fight against terrorism is one of a prophylactic kind: the policing institutions surveil our lives in order to identify individuals that match a certain profile for then to punish them for a crime they will (most certainly) commit. (Any reminiscences of Minority Report in here are obviously not mere coincidence.) The tactics then is then to avoid the crime instead of punishing the criminal; that is, to surveil and control the population instead of disciplining the bad guys by sending them to prison. Very good idea was it not for the fact that the psycho-social development of individuals is not an exact science and nothing assures us that a certain individual will become a criminal just because he or she fits in a certain criminal profile - hence what Hammarberg calls the ‘false positives.’

This move away from discipline to control brings with it strong and real dangers not only for the 'false positives' like Jean Charles de Menezes, the brazilian electrician shot in the head 7 times by the police in the aftermath of the London bombings, but for the general population in terms of the small but substantial changes happening around us - DNA records, ID cards, CCTV systems, and the possibility of having someone monitoring our lives without us knowing simply because we might look like this or that.

Now what made us, heirs of the western democratic values, agree with this is something I’ve been trying to understand for quite a long time now. Citizens of free countries, inhabitants of multiethnic post-colonial cities, we have suddenly accepted to give away our rights - rights to privacy, to anonymity, to movement, to rebellion - in the name of a supposedly boosted sense of security. But the question is: do we really feel safe(r) now? Was it worth it? And, most importantly, will we regret it?

What do you guys think about this?

SOURCES:
Council of Europe: Commissioner for Human Rights, Protecting the Right to Privacy in the Fight against Terrorism, 4 December 2008. CommDH/IssuePaper(2008)3. Online. UNHCR Refworld, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4937a1af2.html  [accessed 13 December 2008]

IMAGES:
#1 © Isabel Pina Ferreira
#2 © Alexandra Ferreira Read more...

Can terrorism be art (be terrorism)?

People gather on both sides, the lights are still off. The photographers at the end of the catwalk, cameras in hand wait for the gold shot. The atmosphere is tense; this is definitely not London Fashion Week.

Suddenly the lights are switched on revealing the catwalk made of canvas - the show is about to start. A fat naked man appears at the top and starts walking down towards the cameras; his body is covered in white paint and there is silence. The fat white man bleeds from both arms the blood that paints the canvas red. The gold shot.

The air is fresh, fast and confident like in any other September morning. The yellow cabs, the rush, the success, the smell of coffee, money and hope, that weird feeling of "today I'm gonna make it. Today I won't fail." It's morning in downtown Manhattan and in a couple of minutes and three blocks down two sister towers will give birth to a monstrous hole covered in blood and anger, (another) bastard child of Humanity.


These two events - one taking place in the space of an art gallery turned institution of global art and the other in a financial district turned institution of global trade - have at least two things in common: both offer themselves for aesthetic judgement and both have a strong political intent in the sense that both can potentially change the order of things.

When writing about the aesthetic judgement, Kant pointed out its division in two categories, the Beautiful and the Sublime. If the pleasure of the beautiful comes with the apprehension of an object that is in harmony with the ideas of our understanding, i.e. with the world-as-we-know-it, the pain of the sublime happens when our understanding is presented with an object that is so big and/or so powerful that (1) it refuses to be thrown into one of the boxes in which we usually try to fit the world and (2, and by consequence) it immediately and painfully questions our knowledge of it.

It is easy to grasp the political character of the sublime. The sublime is the violent and painful feeling that is generated in us when we experience something "too big for words." Something that challenges the way we order the real. Something that might ignite change. The unspeakable.

Let's know think violence. Let's say in a simple way that violence happens when a force A meets another force B and ends up changing the properties (intensity, direction) of the latter, changes that B would never suffer wouldn't it be for A. (An object always offers resistance to any change in its condition - this is what physics called 'inertia' and philosophy, via Spinoza, called 'connatus').

In consequence, we arrive to the point where violence equals politics (equals violence). If violence is the action of A that will cause - or contribute for - a change in B, violence is politics. And it is my view that politics cannot be made without a certain degree of violence. Violence is always already at the very core of becoming (something else).

My question, or better, the problem I would like to throw at you as it were, is an ethical one. To which extent shall one embrace violence in order to bring change? To which extent shall art embrace violence? When is it better to stop (and maybe rethink the strategy)? Is there an absolute limit or is it all about negotiating the limits along the way? Will the aim ever justify the means? What can one do? And how? On an ethical level, what makes the difference between the work of, let's say, Franko B and that of a terrorist group that hits towers with airplanes? WHere does art end and terrorism start? Could (some) terrorist acts ever become art?

Franko B once said:
My work focuses on the visceral, where the body is a site for representation of the sacred, the beautiful, the untouchable, the unspeakable, and for the pain, the loss, the shame, the power and fears of the human condition... Detractors will say that I make monstrous work, and in a way it is: the Latin root monstrare means to show. If a monster is therefore something that shows itself as much as it is seen by you, then let me be a monster.*

(*from Franko B, "I Miss You!" in, Adrian Heathfield (ed.), Live: Art and Performance, 2004, London: Tate Publishing) Read more...

You're all protesters

A favorite pastime of mine while on the tube, after flicking aimlessly through the metro looking in vain for anything vaguely interesting, is to write small messages on the side of particularly infuriating articles. One of my most recent little additions was made to an article that heavily suggested that Boris Johnson was responsible for the open house weekend, when it was actually started in 1992.


For me this is no more than a way to pass the time while giving the newspaper editors a very small and polite kick in the teeth. However it occurred to me that in its own way my little habit, one which I am ironically a little embarrassed of (I always pull the paper up so no one can see what I’m writing), is my own way of protesting against wrongs that I see in the world.

Yesterday I chanced upon a sticker near the south bank picturing an oyster card with the name oyster changed to voyeur. This seemed to me to be in the same vein as my note writing and it got me thinking about how many people are out there making these little protests. I then started asking people “what do you do that you could consider a protest”, and I discovered that everyone I asked did something that could constitute a protest if not every day then definitely every week.


I guess what I’m trying to say is that in our own way we all protest every day, when we disregard a stupid rule or we refrain from buying a certain product. I like to think that in there own little way they change the way the people around us think and that simply expressing yourself is in the end the best way to change the world.

so what do you do?
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