Nuria Guell and Levi Orta; YOU AND WHOSE ARMY

 YOU AND WHOSE ARMY?

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I am not sure where exactly I heard or read that neoliberalism had been the last effective revolution in history. It might have been in a conference of Franco Bifo Berardi in documenta 13 since it makes sense with the text he published for the occasion. In this text he develops an argument that the complexity of social life and flow of information has rendered acts of total transformation- a revolution-  impossible since there is no longer a single identifiable power to subvert. At the same time this saturation overflows our capacity for processing information pushing us to a state of automated decision making and shared behavior that longs for machines of complexity-reduction. Politicians and economist´ s goal becomes then the monopolization of the role of interpreters of this density in order to lead us to believe that we live in a state of symbiosis with the financial apparatus and that our lives must be aligned with its expectations of infinite growth. The premise is that life and capitalism are so intertwined that the end of capitalism would be in fact the end of the world. For Bifo it is foremost a question of form, money is the form, the format of common perception that acts as an automated machine embedded in the body and in the mind of society. Form as the regulator and selector of the process of becoming.   In order to question the financial dictatorship or whatever form is being imposed, the first step is to acknowledge that society is autonomous of the form and that a new form is not only possible but necessary.

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In these political games of perception the resistance must start as well at a perception level which makes art a privileged strategic front. Artists can also play the role of interpreters and work in a performative mode, as an act of language that has the power to produce a different relation between the participants of the communication and therefore a different  landscape for  social action, not to produce a  mechanical effect but to induce  unexpected  waves  that allow the potentialities of a system to emerge.

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This project hopes to put into play different geopolitical situations with different relationships to the power apparatus through the work of Levy Orta (La Habana, 1984) and Nuria Güell (Barcelona, 1981), whose practice goes a step beyond allowing the visualization of the structures and strategies of exploitation and subjugation of the individual in the current state of things. Sometimes nonalignment is not enough, infiltration strategies are necessary to create room to maneuver. Whether it is in a communist or a capitalist context, the documentation of the actions of this artists provide an inside viewpoint of the abuses of power allowed by the established “legality” and the dominant morals but they are always the second stage of an active and subversive infiltration into the system. The spectrum of acts of resistance in different geopolitical contexts meet in the horizon of dissidence. Understanding dissidence, as the yearning that fuels the question: how not to be governed that way? not in the name of those principles nor through the means of those procedures. Not in that way, not for that or for them. 

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The two levels are equally important, Güell creates what she calls displaced legal  applications in which  for example she inverts the profiting logic of the banks into themselves and creates  a manual to expropiate money from them, with specific strategies on how to commit fraud to the bank without being caught.  So the work exists as an installation but  also as a  manual that is actually published and distributed in libraries inserting itself  into reality . The logic of debt lies at the center of the subjugation and empoverishment of social life.  But again is debt a methaphysical inescapable necessity or is it just an act of language as a promise? Güell ´s displaced legal applications reminds us not only that promises can be broken but that sometimes if produced under a cohersive situation of mathematical slavery, they should be. 

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The level of personal investment and commitment  is essential in Orta  and Güell ´s  practice , some of this actions create a situation in which they are playing in the limit of legality at their own risk. Orta contacts an ex -cultural spy of the cuban regime who tips him of an active officer who presents himself as a curator  and creates a specific subversive work in order to follow the bureaucratic path of censorship in Cuba. As a counterpart he finds a flaw in the closed censorship system in a children´ s tv show where you can send drawings and they are shown as part of the program, he uses this gap in the system to infiltrate key censured topics illustrated as children´s drawings which are actually shown on national TV.

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The political genealogy of the term intervention is directly related to the evolution of State power tactics, a State that namely intervenes instead of ruling. This exhibition reflects on artistic practices based on intervention as a method but as one that has evolved mirroring the practices of administration of state power, from direct confrontation to more subtle and undercover operations. Fieldworks or undercover actions that involve certain personal risk for the artists but that follow the rules of the game in order not to be read or discovered as transgressions, not until a second reading occurs in the formalization of the art piece as a document within the jurisdiction of the exhibition space.  Far from weakening their work, it is precisely in the action of covering their backs through the same legal and control strategies of the system they pretend to transgress that the artworks prove to be more revealing. 

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Alejandra Labastida

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Exhibition is supported by: the City of Zagreb and Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia

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General sponsor: INA – Industrija nafte, d.d.

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Works on the exhibition: courtesy of ADN Galeria

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