What can we do with an Apocalypse

It is 2012 and the Apocalypse is here. The question is what can we do with it, what can we do with this concept, what is its potential? Apocalypse in the common sense means the end of the world, it etymologically means a lifting of the veil or a revelation about what is already here, hidden in plain sight.

Nowadays we have too many signs of the end and not so many about the revelation. We cross or we are about to cross some major important boundaries like climate change, species extinction, the disruption of the nitrogen-phosphorus cycles, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, freshwater usage, land cover change... Each of these rifts in planetary boundaries constitutes an actual or potential global ecological catastrophe.(1) The panic of the end is everywhere: it is in the current desperate phase of capitalism with its aggressive and destructive scratching for the last resources, using techniques like tar sands, fracking and deep sea exploitation... And, similarly, it is in the aggressive exploitation of the sensitive zones of human subjectivity - our emotions, empathy, sociability, intuition, imagination are now extracted and put to work at the center of the economy. The consequences on ecosystems, socio-systems, psycho-systems are the same – they are all collapsing.

All this should be presented daily in the news, everybody should think, debate, try to find solutions... But it isn't. To deal with some peripheral symptoms then facing the monster seems to be preferable - what to do with the fact that acidification of oceans dangerously increased by 30% lately, climate change is now largely irreversible (2) or what about the fact that we are in the middle of the fastest mass extinction in the known history, including the 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs extinction? (3)

The spectacle goes on at any price, and the price is continuously growing, while more and more policing at all levels is needed. A militarization of police takes place everywhere. Even drones with no human attached, the perfect partner of capital, are in the air now searching for enemies. And there are drones that are set to operate on the domestic fronts too, the war is with the 99%, the enemy moves closer and closer, the terrorist is your neighbor, the enemy is you. With all the private contractors that are replacing the police and the state army, the administration of death can become more profitable than the exploitation of the living. So, the morbid component of capitalism (until now only externalized and contained at the periphery, in the 3rd and 2nd World) is spreading everywhere.

All these conditions provide a continuous state of emergency, a lot of important distractions and non-events. There is a great time acceleration, always something urgent to figure out, to fix, there is no time to reflect, to evaluate the whole - all the solutions are technical and punctual. The veil is lifted but there is no time to see.

Even the supposed resistance looks to be trapped in this small range of perception – in the end, for protests we have to be realistic and to have reasonable demands - like, everything will be OK, we just have to change this bad and corrupt politicians, we just need to have more people on the streets... There is a very conservative impulse beyond all this. Everything is based on the image of what already is, there is a strange lack of imagination, it seems that the only solution that we can imagine is to amplify the problem.

Two million people in New York against the War in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of Athens, sometimes even winning in confrontation with Police, but what for, to be ruled by a technocrat from Goldman Sachs? The same thing happens now in Romania: the government was changed at "the pressure of the streets" into something much more toxic. Just to have an idea, the prime minister is a former head of a secret service agency, the Ministry of Agriculture is the CEO of Monsanto Romania... We are not ready to face the hopeless situation of the protests, maybe because it is too late, and somehow we can feel it... Ignorance and collective denial seem to be the main strategies in use, in order to cope with the depression related to our present and (no) future.

Our needs are linked in a complicated way with the present capitalist reality and this makes it practically impossible for us to can really move away. Without necessary wanting it, we continue to protect the status quo and to operate according to an economic logic that pushes us to the wall. In a perverse way, we are all depend on our collapse and that's why we can't even imagine an alternative.

Talk with the elephant in the room, in its own language

It is a hopeless situation and we still have too much hope. In the “2012” movie, between the hundreds of the 1% elite that saved themselves on that ark, miraculously there was also one family from the 99% to show that even in the midst of the catastrophic end of the world there is still some hope. We have to kill that stupid hope or to leave it to the 1%.

There are some small signs that we are more ready than before to give up hope and to go a bit beyond the reformist impulses. For instance, as a reaction to the softening of the discourse around the Occupy movement, a FULL COMMUNISM meme appeared on Twitter. Here is a very good description of this meme: Like #occupy, it’s a shared shout of “I’m fucking sick of this shit”. Unlike #occupy, however, it also holds an added threat: “I’m so fucking sick of this shit I have no desire to reform it. I want to go beyond. I want to fuck shit up”. (4) Similarly in Romania people preferred to #occupyRomania, #Universitate (the name of the square where the protests happened in Bucharest), the #revolutie (revolution) hashtag to communicate on Twitter.

And there are also small signs that are visible everywhere in the daily life. For instance in all statistics Romania is one of the most depressed nations. Some friends from abroad are amazed that the waitresses, saleswomen and salesmen are not even trying to smile to their clients anymore. But this is an important sign of sanity, of connection with one's own feelings, of acceptance of depression and the misery of (self)exploitation. It is much more problematic to try to keep it up or to be adjusted. The world as it is now doesn't seem to be the best moment and place to be happy.

Maybe we should occupy our depression and hopelessness and let it work. A lucid desperation can be a good idea. Even fear can be a good idea. Probably the best way to go through this panic and anxiety era is to stay afraid, to stay in contact with the collapse - panic and anxiety to get their object of fear. Maybe it is time to see what is happening when the collective energy of hopelessness, depression, mixed with a lucid fear and an apocalyptic awareness, accumulates. If we don't block them anymore and we let them work.

In one of Castaneda's books (5) Don Juan speaks about a kind of death awareness as the base of some very powerful transformative processes. He speaks about Death as our eternal companion that is always to our left, at an arm's length and it's always watching us, until the day it taps us. Death awareness is essential for a different perception about what is important and to give the necessary impulse to start the radical change of subjectivity needed to become a man of knowledge or sorcerer. It works as an advisor and puts the things that we deal with in a configuration with much more potential.

What if we do the same with apocalypse at a social scale? Being aware that Apocalypse is at the length of an arm away can be the social equivalent of Castaneda's individual approach to death. Having all the time in our peripheral view the current collapse - the thousands of starving children that are dying every day, the 200 species of animals and plants that are disappearing every day - can give us the real dimension of what is happening, the needed urgency and the impulse for radical change. Apocalyptic awareness can be the constant transformative presence that we need - a weapon-concept that reopens the field of the possible in a dead world. So, let’s talk with the 'elephant in the room', in its own language.

1. John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism and Environmental Catastrophe, http://t.co/0AsQYGAw
2. Gilbert Mercier, Overpopulation, Climate Change, Food Crisis, War: The Horsemen Of Apocalyptic Capitalism, http://t.co/LPxz9SE2
3. Here is an archive of articles about the current mass extinction http://www.well.com/~davidu/extinction.html
4. @Spitzenprodukte, On FULL COMMUNISM: cursory notes on the evolution of mimetic non-demands http://t.co/QtW2tWoM
5. Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, http://controlledfolly.googlepages.com

The Inauguration of the People's Salvation Cathedral

The Romanian Orthodox Church wants to build a huge People's Salvation Cathedral. Of course with the money from the State budged (around 900 millions euro). Ironically will be next to the House of the People, the huge building made during Ceausescu's regime.

They started the construction but they already build also a small, simple, cheap and temporary, cartoon made church, as a way to mark the territory. We made a campaign announcing that that's the People's Salvation Cathedral, and we set the day of 11.11.11 for its inauguration.

At the inauguration I appeared as a priest and, after a very short religious procession, I apologized, in the name of the Orthodox Church, for the exploitation and commercialization of gypsy slaves by the Romanian Orthodox Church till the 19 century (a taboo issue for them).

I announced that the orthodox churches will be day and night open, for the homeless people, that are more and more on the streets, evacuated from their homes by the banks.

I announced also some possible reforms inside the Church, like the women to have the same rights as man to perform the mass and to have access in the hierarchical structure at any level, not just to clean the church and sell candles.

But actually I criticized also the hierarchical structure of the Church and the hypocrisy - everything is in gold, allot of properties and political power. The top members of Church travels in limousine surrounded by police, blocking the traffic for the rest of people. I said that all this represents the Antichrist because is the opposite of Jesus message - simplicity, poverty, love... 

But in general I was thankful for the honor to inaugurate the People's Salvation Cathedral and happy for an important step of Romanian Orthodox Church towards christianity  - they chose to do a simple and spiritual church instead of building the opulent home for the Antichrist (of course they didn't).

THE FINAL CRISIS - THE BURST OF THE CULTURAL BUBBLE

AN ARTIST MORE - A TERRORIST LESS

In Romania during the so called "communist period" there was what they called "the resistance through culture". In the sense that some artists and intellectuals didn't compromise to praise the dictator, but at the same time they didn't take any risks, they went with the regime doing their art and now they pretend that they were dissidents. They are very badly judged now. They are called "collaborators". Paradoxically they are more badly judged than the obvious collaborators. People accuse them that it was their responsibility to criticize the regime and because they didn't do it, they legitimized the regime. It was their responsibility to set how the struggle should look like and what they provided was a kind of a fake resistance, succeeding in this way to steal potential from other kinds of resistance.(1)

Same now. There is the obvious collaboration, the clear example being the "creative industries" and the artists that are "sent" in problematic places, in slums, between immigrants or in "emergent" countries to prepare the terrain for "democracy" and capital - the stalkers of capital, like in the past the catholic priests were send in colonies to introduce the christianity and the economic thinking.

But more problematic is the fake resistance, the subtle collaboration. The so called "political art", the majority of "critical theory" that are carefully attentive not to pass some clear limits. It is problematic because they are setting the tone of how the resistance and critique in society should look like.

Analyzing how media works, Chomsky noticed a kind of interiorised self-censorship, an interiorised authority at the core of it. The tendency is to self-adjust to the "normal"/official perception, to the status quo. People automatically take the frame of the superior publications, which take the frame of officials, which take the frame of the financial sustainers. The self-censorship is not so much about what information is presented, it is more about the perspective about reality, about the implicit paradigm from which the reading of what's happening emerges.(2)

This kind of analysis can be easily extended to art and to entire cultural component. The artist, like the journalist, is in a chain of economic-political power relations. He's the subject of a pressure from above - curators, programers, which are the subject of a pressure from politicians or banks/corporations (via financial support). From this point of view the artist is a link between officials and the subjectivities it addresses, an important piece in a chain of power influences.

The majority of the population is sufficiently "covered" by the mass media and entertainment, apparently the contemporary art play a small role in the big picture. Maybe from the quantitative point of view, but from the point of view of how power operates, the target of high culture (contemporary art, academic theory, etc.) is tremendously important because it assimilates and addresses the marginal people that are more at unrest, emancipated, unsatisfied, activists, critical, etc. Foucault noticed that the power always focused to assimilate, to integrate or to criminalize/annihilate this dangerous, more marginal, independent subjects.(3)

Art (and Academia) seems to be some of the best solutions for assimilating, absorbing, discharging and disarming in its key points the resistance, dissent, revolt and frustration accumulated in society. It works like a substitution, it swallows real struggles, the real potentiality and transforms them into consumable spectacular cultural products like art. It is an appropriation of struggles. This accumulation of struggles creates the cultural (and artistic) bubble, a luxurious prison where the dangerous people, thoughts, concepts and intentions are domesticated.

ART BUBBLE
(Art is infinitely better than reality)

Ranciere is enthusiastic about the fact that aesthetics were set since the beginning to work on the egalitarian principles:

"The very idea of Art - of the aesthetic experience - as defining a specific sphere of experience was born in the late eighteenth century under the banner of equality: the equality of all subjects, the definition of a form of judgment freed from the hierarchies of knowledge and those of social life."(4)

I think we can spot here a fundamental problem - the fact that art was set since the beginning to answer to this important needs and aspirations in an alternative reality - to function as a substitute that enables an abstraction from the concrete ideologico-political constellation. Religion offered this kind of compensation-refuge further in time, in the next-other life, art seems more efficient and can give a compensation now, but not here - in alternative realities, escaping in spaces of creativity, representation.

Freud considers that "life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies… There are perhaps three of these means: powerful diversions of interest, which lead us to care little about our misery; substitutive gratification, which lessen it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it. Something of this kind is indispensable."(5)

Art/aesthetic seems to be a good "remedy" that plays all this three palliative functions so needed to cope with the inequality, exploitation, domination and precarity of life. Art can be seen as a space in which you can play with "radical" changes in a safe and inoffensive environment - a provided, institutionalized place for critique and experiment in order to keep the status quo outside of it.

Ranciere and with him others artists and theorists, says that art is already political just because it exists and modifies the regime of sensible, producing emancipation, etc. Of course these theories are a big hype among artists because they justify and provide rationalizations for "my art is my activism" attitude. It is very convenient, you just stay in your art studio and work at the level of finesse and sensible, and you are in the same time revolutionary, subversive and so on. You are a radical artist without touching on the power relations. You keep the privileges and you do resistance at the same time.

THE MORBID SIDE OF CULTURE

Everybody is happy - the artist, the State, the Capital. The Power don't want the artists capacities, intelligence and knowledge to be used in real dissent activities or in real protests. So, since ever, the power is friendly with the artists. They always had a privileged place at the King/Capital court.

We can see the cultural component as the domain of biopolitics, where the power invest in the people's capacities for different reasons - to integrate and assimilate dissent, to softly control the critical discourse, the values and references in society or just to harvest the artists productivity after.

The cultural component can be included in what Chris Hedges calls the soft language of power -"the language of beneficence is used to speak to those outside the centers of death and pillage, those who have not yet been totally broken, those who still must be seduced to hand over power to predators"(6).

The brutal language of power, the war component, the morbid capitalism is the domain of necropolitics, where the power is a dis-investement in life, is more an administration of death, war and brutal exploitation. It is reserved to the periphery of capital in the violent expansion zone where things are turbulent and the power is classical, not subtle, not hidden behind benevolent appearances. The morbid component is for the second world a bit and for the third world a lot.

The morbid component for the periphery cannot exist without the consent of the center, without the cultural component.

And the cultural component, all the financial speculations, immaterial labor, etc. cannot exist without a base, without the classical power, violent exploitation, without the war component for the periphery. In a way all the immaterial labor and the cultural component are more a way to administrate and externalize the death politics in the periphery of the capital. The cognitarians are just the administrators of the very concrete and brutal production that happens in the periphery.

But the periphery is coming closer and closer to the first world. The cuts in fundings for arts, humanities probably means also that the cultural component is not so needed anymore - it is not necessary or it is not working anymore to keep up the appearances, the illusion. So there is a move of the morbid component towards the center. Probably it is better to hope that artists will always be rich...

THE FINAL CRISIS

The morbid and the cultural (spectacle) component put a huge pressure on the subject creating an universal capitalist subjectivity which constantly reinforces the capitalist reality. So it is a vicious circle - a constant unbreackable loop.

The capitalist expansion reached all the populations, all the resources and the limits of the earth. The economic-financial paradigm is omnipresent, addressing the totality of life - at the level of the organization of society through the power of the neoliberal dogma and at the level of subjectivity where probably the last fight, for the most intimate human "resources", capacities, sensibility, intimate desires, believes, is happening now. We can say that the ultimate battle is in the cultural domain which is almost entirely occupied by the economic logic.

Probably in this context if we want to produce a change, first of all we have to go out or against the institutionalized art bubble. White cube and black box provided a bit of oxygen in a stable society and a suffocating environment. They played a function then, they were important. But now is possible much more, the times are changing. We should help that art bubble to burst, the crisis to work. Maybe now, in the crisis there is an opportunity for us to go out from the assigned art bubbles and to use our time and skills to intervene on the biggest stages (mass media, politics).

Maybe is time for art to go where things happen. To interrupt the flow of spectacle, the institutional chain of passing the cultural agenda. Not to listen and even sabotage the administrative protocols in art - the artist has to become a cultural terrorist. "Terrorist" is a label that points towards any enemy, potential danger to the establishment. The terrorist and the little brothers, pirates and hackers are the only ones that are not assimilated and integrated in our society.(7)

And there is an another level were we also should go. If capitalism is modelating our cultural core, we should go at that level too - to radically work, experiment with subjectivity. Not just to play safe in the realm of representation with creativity but to experiment with essential human behaviours, values, perceptions, attitudes. If we really want something to change I think we have to go a bit beyond our comfort and alter the core of our identities. If we are Capitalism, the exploitation, the extinction of species, the climate changes, at least some parts of us have to transform radically or even die. In this sense, maybe we have to embrace a bit of cultural (artistic) apocalypse.

1. See Stefan Tiron, 10 years of beautifying misery in Bucharest http://caminultaucultural.blogspot.com/2011/05/premises-10-years-of-beautifying-misery.html
2. Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, Pluto Press, London, 1999;
3. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, random house, US, 1981;
4. Jacques Ranciere, Art of the possible, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_7_45/ai_n24354911/pg_6/?tag=content;col1
5. Sigmund Freud, Civilization And Its Discontents, Buckinghamshire: Chrysoma Associated, 2000;
6. Chris Hedges, Recognizing the Language of Tyranny, http://jerichorendezvous.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/recognizing-the-language-of-tyranny/
7. See Dorato Action at Pavilion Unicredit as a cultural terrorism example: http://florinflueras.blogspot.com/2011/07/dorato-action.html

Suely Rolnik about the dangers of looting for a capitalist subjectivity (Brazil, 1983)

The break-out of rioting and the break-in of looting that formed part of our life in Brazil for some months in 1983 is the kind of phenomenon that lends itself to a reading in terms of the processes of singularization with their disruptive potential, but also with their seductive promises and perils. We all remember those times when hordes of people suddenly irrupted into the streets in the big city centers, invading, looting, and overturning everything that lay before them. It was particularly noticeable that at first they only stole food, but very soon they moved on to another stage in which they stole anything, sometimes not even for consumption but just for the savor of divesting from the dominant code that free access to things provided.

In this circumstance, as was to be expected, the cities panicked and promptly responded by closing their doors. In the newspapers and on the radio and television there was a procession of deeply worried technical experts and scientists, lay people and specialists, atheists and religious people, civilians and military personnel, intellectuals and business leaders, politicians of the left, center, and right. They all repeated the same refrain: “We can understand that the unemployed demonstrate and demand jobs. Nothing could be more fair and honest. We can even understand that the unemployed an underemployed dare to steal food and clothes—after all, the com-munity owes them at least food and clothing; we can’t let our workers die of want. But stealing jewels, candies, or stereos is rioting. It’s certainly being led by criminals or professional agitators (fascists, according to the left; communists, according to the right). In which case, there is no way that we can let this behavior go unpunished.”

In fact, there were some people who only dared to take clothes and food (in order to work). And it is also true that they were not the real agitators, they were not the bearers of the “breakdown,” despite the importance and legitimacy of their struggle. The disruptive effect lay in the gesture, made up of humor and violence, which shattered a certain conception of the relation between work and leisure; which shattered the criterion of productivity as the principle of the organization of time and space; which shattered the principle of private ownership of the means of production and consumption—a gesture that did not show respect for a life reduced to hierarchical values organized in accordance with general equivalents, and that manifestly divested from man, reduced to the condition of a neutral support for values dissociated from sensible experience.

And, beyond all that breaking and smashing, what was also broken down was a certain conception of political struggle that reduced it to a polarized confrontation between interlocutors authorized and recognized by a state machine. The disruptive effect lay, above all, in breaking away from that dependent, infantilized, demanding posture, a “weaning” from the state as a universal provider, a privileged interlocutor, a certified translator of all desires. In the tumult of the rioting, what seemed to be shattered was basically the mode of production of subjectivity that characterizes contemporary societies.
...
What was unbearable in all this was the danger of the breakdown of the principal mechanisms of the society in which we live. For those who viewed the events in that way, changes are only conceivable on the molar plane, the plane of forms and their representations, whereas each and every change of molecular texture is invariably experienced as conveying a danger of violence and chaos. The preservation of the texture of a particular social order is confused with the preservation of the social order as such, whatever its nature may be; and, implicitly, the preservation of the texture of a particular psychic world is confused with the preservation of the psychic world as such. In other words, what was confused in this case was the preservation of a particular figure of oneself with the preservation of one’s supposed essence. From this viewpoint, the rioting conveyed something much more violent and distressing than having one’s property looted. The fear of losing houses and objects is nothing in comparison with the terror of losing oneself.
...

Excerpts from Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007

DORATO ACTION - PAVILION DISCREDIT

The 'Presidential Candidate' was happy when it got the invitation to participate in 'Just do it. Branding biopolitics' exhibition in Pavilion Unicredit space.

At Pavilion Unicredit one encounters :

Radical left, comunist, anarhist texts – in reality, corporate atmosphere, clear hierarchy and chain of command;

Exhibiting texts and works which critique authoritative power positions – in reality, using any means of authoritative power – may it be academia, prestige, lengthy self-eulogizing biographies;

Texts which critique mass-media manipulation – in reality, using the same tactics of manipulation, disinformation, denigration, attack against anyone who critiques their institution;

Statements for institutional critique and artists’ absolute freedom – in reality, censoring artists which through their works critique the context in which they were invited - in this case, Pavilion Unicredit.

Texts and works which condemn exploitation and neo-slavery – in reality, the exploitation of artists’ work;

Praise for the bank that funded the art institution - artists are not payed, but they are asked to write everywhere the name of the institution in capital letters: PAVILION UNICREDIT.

It seemed a clear case of anarcho-corporate schizophrenia, the perfect context to challenge the politics behind the so called political art.(1)
But, of course, things started to go not so well after telling Pavillion Unicredit what we planned to do and we sent the following text for the exhibition publication:

The Death of the Romanian Presidential Candidacy

The Presidential Candidacy project is dead! Long live The Presidential Candidacy artistic project!

The Romanian Presidential Candidate is happy to announce that the political project has finally arrived home - Contemporary Art. Here, with the support of the State, corporations or banks, is still possible to be political, to do political art. We are happy to exchange the grey, boring and ugly world of politics for the beautiful, free, open, creative, flexible, progressive, white, clean but also critical, radical and political world of art.
The Candidate

After some attempts to control our work, we were kicked out a couple of days before the opening with an email directly from the director, Razvan Ion, even if he previously stated that he would leave all the decisions to the curator, Simina Neagu.

But we decided already long time ago to not respect anymore the institutional power to mark the separation between invited/uninvited artist. In the Romanian Dance History project we reserve the right to perform on stages or present our work in art galeries without any invitation or approval, we decided to take control of the artistic spaces, to not be always framed, programed, curated, etc.(2)

Now we wanted to go a step further, to make all this dynamics visible by reversing this logic - to reverse the hierarchy in which the artist serves the institution: instead of acting under the institution umbrella. the artists can now be the ones framing the institution.

We anounced everywhere the opening of 'Just do it. Branding biopolitics' exhibition as a Presidential Candidacy event. Basically we took the event, we reframed the opening and the exibhition as ours. We started a promotion campaign and we invited the people to come to celebrate the opening with us and with a glass of Dorato champagne. The Dorato champagne is a good looking bottle but with a very, very cheap and dubious content. (around 1euro/bottle)

Furthermore, we announced that will be a special opening, since people were invited to see the opening as our performance. Fortunately it turned out to be a very interesting spectacle. The tension with the Pavilion crew built up so much before the opening that they exploded when they saw us entering with the Dorato champagne bottles in our hands. The show started with the Pavillion crew, led by its director Razvan Ion, screaming and pushing us out of the door in front of the shocked audience that didn't really understood what was going on. It was a big scandal, at some point the Pavilion director, who coordinated everything as a perfect general, put one of the employees to throw the seized bottles down the street (precisely at the entrance of the underground pasage). Some of the Dorato bottels felt on a car and the driver arrived furious and eager to see who was the idiot that did such a thing. In other words, it was a mess.(3)

A scandal is a moment when something is revealed, something burst publicly. It is a context in which the hidden or unconscious power relations become visible and important: a moment of the real, when things are exposed.

We just created the conditions for the real politics reveal, almost following the classical ready-made principle. All the essence of the anarcho-corporatism schizofrenia of Pavilion Unicredit's directors was there in front of everybody's' eyes. The Candidate accomplished his intention, now the contrast was made obvious: the political art on the walls and on the screens of the gallery and the real politics at work visible in the scandal.(4)

1. Here I wrote more about contemporary art situation: http://florinflueras.blogspot.com/2011/08/morbid-side-of-culture.html
2. See Romanian Dance History project: http://rodancehistory.blogspot.com
3. See Valentina Desideri's description of her experience in that evening: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1BbrXUGooOqIIlfpZMYy3PIUi68UC0R7b0A7Z7IaPV1A
4. See also another similar cases with artists that tried to collaborate with Pavilion Unicredit: http://art-leaks.org/

Discussion with Franco Berardi Bifo about the Presidential Candidacy project

Bifo: You underline awareness as the "main word". Don't you think that impotent awareness is kind of masochistic? What's the use of awareness when conscious collective action seems impossible?

Florin Flueras: Probably the impossibility of conscious collective action is because too much unconscious collective action - too much production, agitation, too much immersion in the official perception of the reality, too much involvement in the consumerist-capitalist religion.

Maybe for a conscious collective action the first thing that we have to do is to make space by stoping the unconscious collective action. A moment of paralyzing awareness can be good - a total stop, a total silence, a zero moment.

You have announced your presidential candidacy for the next elections in Romania. What's your aim? What's your program? Do you want really to change the political course of Romania?

We are a group and we mainly come from performance/contemporary dance. At some point we couldn't avoid anymore to raise a fundamental question for our art. What is the point to do our performances in the theatre, what is the point to add another spectacle in this society of generalized spectacle? Based on this question we started what we call postspectacle practice, with the intention to go with our skills and knowledge as performers and makers on the main stages - mass media and politics.

The candidacy is a mean to enter in the official debate, to get on TV basically. We don't go on TV to announce an alternative or another program; we go to expose what is behind a program, how a program works, to expose and to play with the spectacle of power and with the power of spectacle.

We don't enter in the political life because we have a solution. We enter more to raise the avoided questions and to deconstruct the official solutions, to make space, to create the premises for collective intelligence to manifest.

We don't have a plan because planning implies a logic of authority that we want to question. We see every day the unhappy results of planning the lives of the people by the state or corporations. People have the capacity to organize themselves if they are allowed to (as the workers that occupied the factories in Argentina proved, and many other communities when a vacuum of power has occurred). So maybe we can say that our plan is to un-plan. As we said in our announce for the candidacy, we want the power in order to dissolute the power.

We are very aware that first of all we cannot win the elections, and if we do, it doesn't matter. You don't do politics in Bucharest these days. You can see constantly how IMF functions as a kind of super ego that regulates the entire political and economical life of the country. So the democratic game doesn't mater as long as policies are made in supra-democratic structures like IMF, World Trade Organization, World Economic Forum, etc. What they call politics in Romania is the following of the directives of the supra-democratic structures and a bit of a provincial mafia administration and fights for the leftovers. Basically they take their commissions by selling the politics and the economics of the country.

The power becomes more and more verticalized and globalized and the authority becomes more and more complex, integrating the means of discipline, control and management of perception (means of producing auto-control - the interiorized authority). There is not a passage from disciplinary society to society of control, to arbitrary power, it is an accumulation - all kind of coercion coexist and amplify each other, shaping a power that reaches the limits of the world and the core of the subjectivity (exploiting or make us to self-exploit our souls, how you very well point out).

It looks like we are definitely lost. No possible plan, no possible solution, no hope. There is nothing to do but something must be done. We give up hope and in the same time we can somehow (secretly) believe in an event, a miracle or at least an apocalypse.

Can you describe the current situation of the young generation in your country? What are the labour conditions? What the average salary of a young worker?

The average fee in Romania is around 360 euro/month. Better for the people that work in informatics (majority young) average 850/month.

It was just voted the new working legislations and they are proud about its flexibility. But basically it is a flexibility for corporations, for employers to dispose even more and easier of the time and life of the workers, to be able to fire them easily and to overwork them. Basically the rights of the workers are decimated.

Romania is a clear case of a Second World country situated somewhere between the first world where the power invests in some people’s capacities in order to harvest their productivity after, and the third world with its brutal exploitation, fordist production, etc. So you can find something close to the third world sweat shops but also the first world immaterial labour.

How large is the space of cognitive work in the Romanian economy? Can we speak of a precarious cognitariat? What is the salary of a school teacher?

They reduced a lot the salaries for education. The perception is that you are a kind of loser if you work in the pre-university education. So the people avoid teaching and the quality of education is going always down.

The salary of school teachers are between 180 euro and 380 euro in pre-university education. In the Universities can go much higher, like 4000 euro/month in some cases (they were scandals on this issues).

I don't know statistics about how much cognitive work we have. But I can give you other statistics that I think can say something about this issue. Romania has the highest speed of internet in Europe and the first place for internet illegal activities too. Another curious thing is that Romania is the only country from Europe where the law that oblige internet providers to save personal information from people (emails, etc.) it was not approved.

We can speak about a generalized precarious life here. The people that have a job are afraid that they will lose it. And the others are improvising on the spot, each day, to survive. The official debate is allot around how to get rid of state employees, what is still possible to privatize and how to cut what we still have from education, healt care, pensions, etc. Like almost everywhere we assist at the killing of the social state.

What is the mind-scape of the young generation? Which kind of drugs (legal, illegal) are prevailing?

The main drugs, like everywhere in Capitalism, are coffee and allot of alcohol. Coffee to push the productivity, alcohol to kill the little free time and any possibility of a scary moment of lucidity. For the marginal people there is heroin, and for the very marginal the aurolac (a cheap paint inhaled from a plastic bag). I heard allot about people that take Xanax (anti-panic and anti-anxiety pills) and anti-depressives, but I don't know statistics. But I know a statistic that says that generally Romanians administrate themselves legal drugs when they are sick, without consulting a doctor (too expensive).

In general the mindscape is more and more shaped towards right wing, neocons directions, by money and propaganda that gives astonishing results. There is a very toxic mixture of nationalism combined with orthodox religion, racism, homophobia, etc. And this is growing and growing.

The other big tendency is a more centric one, perfectly represented by people from the creative industries. People that are cynical, not interested in politics, "against any ideology" and activism. They are into a life style copying the kind of Berlin atmosphere, parties, drugs, etc. But in practice they are not apolitical at all, they actually are working in creative industries like publicity, etc. - at the core of neoliberalism. And behind the attempts of cool, fashionable, original appearances, the majority shares a very conventional, mainstream and political ignorant perception. They use social networks mostly just for self expression and party events. This category consumes, besides the coffee-alcohol, also ecstasy, cannabis, cocaine, amphetamine, etc.

The people invested so much in the Capitalism dream during the dictatorship, that now the confrontation with the real is totally overwhelming. The delusion is too big. No more revolutionary energy. It was consumed, discharged in 89. Now it is apathy and depression.

But there are good sides too. From many points of view seems to be more potential, the capital is not so well organized, there are gaps, the reality and capitalism not totally coincide like in the west. And there is a special understanding in some people, because a change in political systems and official discourses like we had after the revolution can create awareness and a distance from any political system - skepticism towards the power and its solutions in general.

Some months ago we heard voices of a student's movement in Bucharest. How did it evolve? What is the condition of school, and of the university in your country? What the effects of neoliberal politics on the educational system? Do you see any sign of student's consciousness and self-organization?

What you heard was the protests of workers and pensioners, when the government cut 25% of salaries of state workers and 15% from pensions. Is an atypical situation, the most revolutionary generation here are the pensioners, they continued the protests for many days. From this point of view the students appear more conventional and conservative than police - while everywhere in Europe students were beaten by police, here one of the most radical action it was the police protest and strike.

The leaders of the student unions are part of a very corrupt system, similar to the leaders of working syndicates, they are in close dubious relations with the political parties and usually they enter in one of the parties structures after they finish school.

There is no sign of political consciousness and self-organization... It seems that the school works perfectly in creating conventional thinking and obedience. The recent neoliberal policies will complete what is already a disaster. A school in which study and education is not possible, only a dressage for interiorizing the authority and a preparation for exploitation.

How can artistic action interfere with the social process? How can an artist or a poet produce changing effects on the social sphere?

After the capitalism expansion reached all the populations, all the resources and the limits of the earth, now the fight is for the most intimate human "resources", capacities, sensibility - we can say that the ultimate battle is in the art domain. So I don't see so much art as a weapon for fighting Capitalism but more as a battlefield. A battlefield that unfortunately is alredy almost entirely occupied by the enemy, the economic logics. The power domesticated and almost entirely integrated the art and the artist.

In Romania during the Communism period functioned what they called "the resistance through culture". In the sense that some artists, writers, didn't compromised to praise the dictator, but at the same time they didn't take any risk, they went with the regime doing their art and now they pretend that they were dissidents. They are very badly judged. They are called 'collaborators'.

But now is it not the artists that legitimize Capitalism? The artist is in a chain of economic-political power relations. He's the subject of a pressure from above - curators, programmers, which are the subject of a pressure from politicians or banks/corporations (a soft invisible pressure via access to funds). From this point of view the artist is a link between officials and subjectivities and their knowledge and sensibility is preferable to work for power than against.

If we really want to do something, it would be a bit less comfortable, less safe - we have to assume the risks of loosing the artistic privileges and to be exiled from the official art, from the court of the Capital. If we want to produce change in the social sphere first of all we have to go out or against the institutionalized art bubble. To interrupt the flow of spectacle, the institutional chain of passing the cultural agenda. To not listen and even to sabotage the administrative protocols in art - from artists to become cultural terrorists.

"Terrorist" is a label that points towards any enemy, potential danger to the establishment. The terrorist and the little brothers, pirate and hacker are the only ones that are not assimilated and integrated in our society. Maybe now, in the crisis is an opportunity for us to go out from the assigned art bubbles and to use our time, skills and knowledge to intervene on the biggest stages (mass media, politics). Maybe is time for art to go where things happen.

Another possible alternative is for us to become saints, prophets, mystics. What I want to say with this is to radically work and experiment with subjectivity. Not just to play safe in representation with creativity and fantasy but to experiment with essential human behaviours, values, perceptions, attitudes, states of mind, sensibility - so radical that it become religious. If we really want something to change I think we have to go a bit beyond our comfort and to alter the core of our identities. If we are Capitalism, the exploitation, the extinction of species, the climate changes, at least some parts of us have to transform radically or even die. In this sense, maybe we have to embrace a bit of (artistic) apocalypse.

Financial Soul

Financialization is a term used by economists to describe one of the main characteristics of the late Capitalism - the tendency of the financial instruments and corporations to dominate the rest of the industrial and agricultural economy and even politics.

In the past the Divinity was the dominant force in culture and the soul was the term that pointed towards the core of subjectivity, being transcendent to personal-psychological identity and related with this exterior Force.

What happen with the core of subjectivity, let's keep calling it "the soul", when the dominant transcendent force is financial?  What kind of subjectivity emerge through this financialization of values, behaviors  attitudes - of life? We can speak about the emergence of a financial or financialized soul in our contemporary culture?

We are living in a so called post-ideological, post-believe period. But there are two types of ideology: an explicit ideology - one that you are aware of, and an implicit one - one that is unnoticed and expressed in our "free choices", behaviors and attitudes... Like the core of values and beliefs that we all have even if we are not aware of them. So, what is the contemporary religion that runs mostly unquestioned in the background of our attitudes and behaviors? What is this 'religion' who constantly produce and administrates the financial soul?

Why not to approach the financial logic and corporate behaviors from a religious point of view and to look at the core of our attitudes, daily activities and hidden religious/ideological believes, from the perspective of financialization. To put in relation financial capitalist behaviors and practices with the religious ones. To expose how the ideology is reflected in our practices and daily behaviors as well as how the practice creates the ideology - to wok at the level of somatic politics.

Postspectacle Practice

Postspectacle practice is an ongoing questioning process that deals with performance and its political connotations. It addresses the changes that are taking place within representational arts in particular and in cultural practices in general. In a time dominated by spectacle, performing arts have to reconsider their role - and their power - in society at large. In this world of generalized spectacle, what’s the point to add another spectacle in the theatre?

Postspectacle Practice extends in 2 different directions:

1.In the theater we propose alternatives to spectacle.
- bringing in the theatre the "outside spectacle". The idea is to produce friction between contexts/conventions/languages like we did with the military performance (a military drill on the dance floor).  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dICPoZGObQ
- opposing spectacle - if entertainment dominates the mass media and politics maybe we should bring in the theater serious stuff like political theory, critique and cultural deconstruction.
- hacking the big festivals and big art events, as we did with The Romanian Dance History, trying to reveal the logic operating within art institutions and the way values are confirmed and affirmed, as well as the artists value and prestige.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AupKHQL-UgM

2. Performing on the big stages
The second direction is to use our performing skills and knowledge on the big stages of politics and mass media, as we did in the TV performance 2012 - ‘Ultima Apocalipsă’. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6qxqKXoi6Y
Moreover we decided as the third part of the postspectacle trilogy to run for president in Romania. We have, since 2009, already made a few interventions and campaign events. The elections are in 2014 but we need that time to organize, explore political practices and make it into the official realm of power as politics as a legitimate candidate. For the postspectacle practice the most important goal is to gain access to these areas and set up actions which deconstructs rituals and create awareness of these charged contexts and also (with the presidential candidacy) to affirm new subjectivity paths and reaffirm politics as an open field of negotiation.

Postspectacle wants to release the accumulated spectacle. The spectacle locked the creativity, performativity in a far away, safe, distant, inoffensive bubble. Spectacle is a commodity that you can consume, or it can consume you, in theaters, on screens, in politics, etc. Postspectacle is when the bubble is breaking and the reality comes in your face.

I'm the Romanian Dance History and I'm a terrorist

The Romanian Dance History doesn’t wait politely in line when it feels to enter the stage and participate in an important dance festival. The Romanian Dance History despises the hierarchical protocols of validation and presentation of art and chooses to terrorize all institutions, authorities and hierarchies. The Romanian Dance History definitely prefers to do cultural terrorism than art. The Romanian Dance History is not something that you should identify with or be proud of, it is more something to be afraid of: beware!
So when you are ready, go on stage and say I’m the Romanian Dance History and I want to start a revolution tonight, and do it…

the candidate speech in the romanian dance history shop

In general our ways of thinking and functioning are very much influenced by the culture, tradition, education and everything that comes from the past. The tendency is to let history answer the problems.. To search for models, values, norms and principles in history, all based on the past..

We cannot allow this anymore.. This model (pattern) works perfectly only in a stable, secured situation in which there are not so many fundamental changes. In a situation in which the grandparents and the nephews share the same world.. There the solutions from a generation can be applied easily to the next generation. In this kind of contexts it was the job of all the religions, cultural and artistic institutions to pass the values, beliefs - the cultural frame, the operating system from a generation to the next.

Now we are living something completely different.. something fundamentally new happens, a fundamental transformation occurs.. Even if you look at the statistics, almost all the parameters that shape our world are changing in an exponential pace. We are in an exponential accelerating transformation process. So in this case the old pattern of transfering knowledge, values, attitudes and behaviors can be actually the biggest problem, not the solution.. Because it stops adaptation and evolution..

The problems that we are confronted with are radical, fundamental and the answers are weak, unaware or with bad intentions. How Bifo said - only a mad doctor will propose the problem as treatment, but the mad doctor hapens to be at White House.. So the general frame about the crisis and solutions of crisis is set from the top of the hierarchy. The power try to save itself at the expenses of the periphery. Banks and corporations at expense of the ordinary slaves, the old empires or colonial forces at expense of second and third world. The capital at the expense of precariat. Externalisation or a better term gived by marina grizinic - Necropolitics. But there is aso a good point in all this - at least the differentiation between the chosen ones and precariat will be more visible, the true intentions will be manifested..

Our subjectivity is constructed and consolidated in the ideology, especially by a neoliberal frame of mind, how marina griznici put it, the reality and capitalism coincide. The terms biopower, cognitive capitalism, discipline society, society of spectacle, society of control, arbitrary power or the concept of the Empire of Negri and Hardt are trying to catch this new manifestations of power that are so diffuse and are operating freely at the base of our individuality. The power becomes more perverse, more ubiquitous and probably impossible to stop. Our core structures are corrupted and the instance of control becomes an interiorised authority.

The human as a construction of history, of the past, lives his agonizing apocalypse.. we are living an apocalypse because everything that we know in an increasing pace will not work anymore, the institutions, the ideologies, the policies are becoming obsolete.. how Franco Berardi put it - we just entered a catastrophic morphogenesiss.

It is crucial to have the force to see this as a positive fact. The "human" values, beliefs are the cause of the crises. We have to go further, to surpass the human condition. A radical, basic reconfiguration is needed anyway. How Zizek put it - to accept the apocalypse first and after to see what can be done..

There is not a saving ideology, the problem is overwhelming, we don't know what to do but we know that we have to move on, to change radically. Let's start by being aware without having a masterplan, avoiding the corrupted solutions from old ideologies that pop up everywhere. Let's see where we arrive, to not be afraid of testing, of risking our obsolete human nature. If you manage to produce a mutation you create possibilities for others too. There is nothing to hold on to. We have to produce disidentification when it is still possible. If it is still possible and we are not completely submitted already. Let's urgently start to create new subjectivities, to go posthuman.
So give up hope and enjoy the collapse!

Cooperativa Performativa

Before (concept)
Maybe in a process the most important thing is how to work, to find a concept for working, in order to do something interesting, "new", you have to challenge the means of production..

The Cooperativa Performativa intention is to use the unpredictable interaction between more processes that are meeting in the same space and time, in order to create new dynamics - a synergic system (a system in which the processes are amplify by the interactions, evolving together and the result mysteriously is bigger than the sum of the components).

Cooperativa Performativa is a frame for a group of persons to collaborate so that each one to develop his own project. A very practical working protocol: less space, one studio for developing five pieces; less money, with the money for a project we did five; multitasking - we where involved in five projects simultaneously. One motivation was that each of us to develop in his direction instead of correcting/compromising our desires in order to find a common sense. It was a frame designed especially for the possibility of disagreement, to avoid the endless negotiations for arriving inevitable to the lowest common denominator.

Can be an alternative to the old models who encourage that products and information should be guarded, kept secret, and used as a means to separate for competitive advantage.. is based on openness - the possibility to transfer materials, knowledge, strategies, methods between processes and to start from not knowing place - to allow that this complex situation of connecting processes to find a way to work.. 

Seems to be in the air now this shift of focus from unit, product, towards connection, link, relation. in a relation the other is not so predictable like yourself and this force you to go out from your territory .. Cooperativa Performativa wants to provide the frame for the situation of being lost in the process to appear, to deliberately lose the control of the process in order to can go in unknown. to work indirectly towards the product, to go sometimes out from your knowledge and practise.

Cooperativa Performativa operates in order to question/challenge things like: art institutions attitudes of putting the artists in a competition situation for founding or visibility. Proprietary feelings and copyright attitudes related to own work. The necessity of governance or of an hierarchical structure in a group. The classical ways of collaboration oriented towards a product and based on agreement, negotiation and compromise. The importance of originality and creativity and of protective attitudes towards them. The question is what is the main motivation behind doing a work - success or a genuine interest, if is second you are interested to share and to copy, you don't care about protecting your "originality", your territory.

After - Sect Mentality exposure:
In every (closed) community there is a sort of unquestioned hierarchy, dominance, influence. Cooperativa Performativa frame based on decentralized, non-hierarchical collaboration entered in conflict with this "establishment". Personal conflicts, artistic rivalry, group status, dominance, hierarchy are some of the layers activated by our proposal.

Usually in a community there is a tendency to form a clan mentality based on unquestioned common believes, values, attitudes, prejudices and unconscious influences. It is commode to interiorize the values, attitudes, behaviours and to function "intuitively", "naturally", or based on "what you feel"... but running in the background the operating system of your group, having all the time a "moral" bio-cultural authority behind. Based on this authority easily judging, give verdicts, take decisions. It's a very simple way of thinking, it tells you what is good/bad, correct/incorrect, moral/immoral. One of the ways in which this protectiveness is manifested is by killing the open discussion, in order to solve the problems inside the frame, on safe territory where everything is a common moral, instance, unquestioned just applied. This mentality instantly tells you who are the friends and the enemies. The sect mentality and moral operates for protecting the property, for teritorrialization, not around real relations or feelings. Probably because of the long history of hierarchy and authority in the communities, the power relations are deeply biological and cultural inscribed.

People do everything to protect their way of life and their level of comfort. If you don't want to change and you don't want to become irrelevant the only solution is to conserve your status and position by other means, like putting down the others in order to be equally weak. If you cannot update yourself the solution is to block the others development too. We had this experience with some artists from an old generation - the critique was received as a personal attack, they closed all the time the dialogue. I call this "ianegic complex" (named after a Romanian dance teacher who reacted aggressively to new tendencies, in order to protect her importance in the dance community).

So beyond the artistic production the project created awareness about the social-political relations in our group-community. As a way of production was very interesting and succeeded to create different dynamics, etc. We had a quite unpredictable process, inventing the working methods on the way. As a result we developed five performances not very similar, in my opinion. I don't know if it is something in common in the end in our works. According to some feedbacks, at three of us was visible a common interest in finding a direct, open and relaxed way of approaching the audience and in the dissolution of convention - a specific ideology or mentality about theatre and performance. The problems in our process appeared just when we dropped our concept - that each of us to develop his own thing in our meetings - and we tried to do something together as a group, to find agreement and common decisions.

cooperativa performativa vs. the secret dance sect

A scandal started when I published an interview that analysed our process during the Cooperativa Performativa project by pointing some extensions to society and politics. Aggressive attitudes and some hysterical reactions appeared in the community. In analytical psychology this overreactions are clear signs that hidden complexes and problematic points are touched. I didn't wrote nothing new, nothing that we didn't discussed before, so the scandal must be related with the public image, social appearance and all what is associated with this - social status, power and influence in the community. Is very interesting to observe how the proposal of challenging the hierarchies, influence, property, dominance in artistic context was extended in our personal life and now seems to be extended in the dance community.

Stere Popescu a Romanian choreographer active in the 60's followed very closely the cooperativa performativa activity, especially the present scandal between us, extended in the dance community too. He's known for his entire life research on scandal and he is a convinced anarchist. Anyway we figured out at some point that he uses twitter in order to reflect on our process and especially on our scandal, to give us some messages, advices and even some instructions. We all follow him on twitter because he's a living legend of Romanian dance history.

There are some rumours that he felt in love with a cooperativa member. And some say that he's observations are irrelevant because he was too subjective or he just followed an hidden agenda. I think that this is a mean strategy to dismiss he's disturbing criticism, observations and insights. The fact that he felt in love didn't change the fact that his observations were true, insightful or provocative. I can see his twitter stream as an interesting and of course subjective documentation of our process. Is interesting how each tweet function independent but also can make sense together with the others. Twitter was also one of the influences for cooperativa concept as a model for a decentralized, anarchic, sharing and network based culture, so i think that can be interesting to see his twitter stream..

But before that is good to mention that he sometimes use his own cryptic terminology like:

"ianegic complex" - named after a romanian teacher and choreographer known for her excessive protectiveness, territorialization, aggressive rejection of new tendencies and also for her behaviour of not saluting and displaying strange grimaces to her artistic enemies (the avant-garde).

"sect" - he affirms that a part of our dance community functions based on unquestioned common core of attitudes, believes, values and behaviours, in order to reinforce some practices and to protect artistic territories.

"dated" - Stere use quite often words like old-school, out dated.. He believes that we are in an accelerating evolution/change period. The things are getting quicker out dated and this enhance the tendency of people to be stuck in the "old" patterns of doing and judging things and also the tendency to identify themselves with the old solutions, to protect them aggressively and to force them upon new situations.

"sedative art" - he calls like that a large part of art practice that is politic unaware and because of this, is perfectly integrated and assimilated by a consumerist-capitalist-neoliberal frame, functioning like elevate entertainment for the system. He oppose this term to "radical" or "terrorist art".
Stere's twitter stream about cooperativa: http://twitter.com/sterepopescu

"products and information should be guarded, kept secret, and used as a means to separate for competitive advantage" #dated

don't be ashamed to use your own ideas and call you an artist

morality and social norms are to protect the property, to territorialize, not to sustain the real relations or feelings

training for a cultural terrorist - notice the hidden hierarchy, influence and dominance in your group, speak about it and run...

the power has the monopole of true.. if another true enters the stage is received as aggression and the scandal begins, im happy..

propose a new direction in art with the hidden motivation to upset your friends.. allow the ianegic complex to appear..

what do you protect? your identity? your image? your social status? your commodity? all this will disappear, soon.

the #sect rejects the change because everything is ok, provoke a scandal to allow the good atmosphere to disappear

identify yourself with your group and then you will just know what is good/bad, correct/incorrect, moral/immoral..

the sect kills the public debates and keep things private to can control them secretly in the small talk and gossip activities of community

reject agreement based collaborations as #dated and unhealthy propagation of common sense and prejudices, allow disagreement, be happy

distractions, parties, drugs are so 90's.. awareness, performative activism and cultural terrorism are the new fun..

#dated = your attitudes and values are not questioned and updated, they come from the past and are inadequate and irrelevant to the present

talent, creativity, self-expression, aesthetic, composition and fantasy are easy to remove obstacles for a postspectacle terrorist artist

avoiding normalization is a constant struggle.. and if you are close to succeed the reward is excommunication

find an open and relax way of approaching your audience, pretend that you are better than them..

kill the artist inside of you and feel free to look outside, via @brynjar

we do everything to protect our way of life, our commodity, that's why we are so happy

to be in harmonie with something profoundly wrong is sick, be a terrorist to your own identity - do something regrettable..

sedative art is so boring and overestimated but helps the people to be more attuned to the corporate neoslavery

kill the private, go public there is nothing to hide or protect, everything is acceptable, share your life, the posthuman is near..

radical politic art, cultural terrorism, performative activism are making contemporary dance to look so 90's #dated

@florinflueras you pretend to do "a brave search of the ultimate reality", check the dominance-influence relations in your group

extend open source and deterritorialization into your life and relations, but don't cry after