Political and artistic resistance

The shape reminds of a little spaceship, the sound feels uncanny—like a swarm of bees. Its movement seems beautifully shy and aggressive at the same time and its cyborg-like nature seems somehow human. Drones are the centerpiece of my current research and artistic practice and I realized the dangers and potential dilemmas first hand. One day, my drone just disappeared. I lost the connection. The drone took off as usual, then suddenly accelerated and turned towards the middle of a lake as if it had a mind of its own. It turned right and was gone. Maybe someone else hacked the remote, maybe it was a technical glitch, maybe the drone had taken control over itself.

When looking up the word “drone” one reads about recent collisions with planes and the horrific reality of drone strikes. But drones also provide new forms for artistic expression and journalistic investigation. Drawn by both the threatening and beautiful aspects of these new technologies, I am trying to further explore our relationship with drones through my arts practice but also through a theoretical approach.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger has argued that we will never be able to explore our relation to technology as long as we think about it as something only technological. Thought to the end, this would mean that we remain unfree, chained to the technology, no matter if we approve it or deny it. The most dangerous thing would be to see technology as something neutral, because then we would be completely at the mercy of it and remain blind for its essence. Instead, we should be questioning technology. Heidegger’s idea of the essence of technology is both technical and poetic. In the essence, he sees a disclosure rather than a mean. One way of approaching this issue with Heidegger is by art, as this area is connected to technology but completely different to it at the same time.

Thus the interest in researching about the drone lies in exploring a new technological tool and perspective which I think could develop into a new practice of contemporary art. Against the backdrop of these thoughts, it is vital to shift our focus away from attempts to control these technologies and push aside fears that they could control us one day. Rather we should be questioning these new forms of technology and try to understand their essence, in terms of their origin, their relation to the human and our common future.

Heidegger’s advice seems topically relevant, at a time in which we seem to sleepwalk into a future of observation and control. In social but also political terms, it is essential to reflect on how this future would look like, as we can expect the use of drones in logistic, military and other areas to increase significantly. This not only means raising questions on ethical and legally issues amongst many others but more import: How this will affect being human in general?

When trees were uprooted in Gezi Park in Istanbul on May 27th 2013, environmentalists started occupying the green area, triggering the largest spontaneous social and cultural movement Turkey had ever experienced: the Gezi Resistance. With people of the most divergent views converging in Gezi Park and Taksim Square, the area became a government free zone for the following two weeks, creating a fruitful platform for all kinds of creativity. During these warlike but carnivalesque days, songs and slogans of hope, performance acts and unique visuals emerged outside conventional tropes through art, humour and imagination. As artistic and political demonstrations merged, the civilian participation of the audience in art invaded politics and created the incisive Gezi Spirit, which is still present in the hearts of the people. In order to strengthen the population to continue resisting a government generating consumption only, artists commemorate the spirit of the revolts in their exhibitions, concerts, performances and artistic works even years after the uprising.

Silence features prominently in both political and academic debates about resistance and complicity with repressive orders. On the one hand, the dictum ‘silence is complicity’ is frequently taken for granted. On the other hand, heroes are thought to be those who ‘speak up’ or ‘break the silence’, contest the regime and its henchmen, agitate and take up arms. This paper troubles these assumptions about silence as complicity and speech as resistance. It argues that silence provides an interesting and productive angle for criticising the idealised, temporally static, voluntarist, act-centred and virtuous vision view of heroes that usually dominates national-myth making. The many ways in which resisters deployed silence selectively, strategically, sometimes courageously, sometimes cowardly is erased from redemptive, idealising national narratives of heroism. It is by looking at these silences theoretically and historically that I hope to decentre this hegemonic heroic understanding of resistance. The work of Nobel Laureate Herta Müller serves as an illuminating example.

Keywords: resistance, heroism, silence, vulnerability, Herta Müller

Published in: "Displace, A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas", Mindaugas Gapsevicius Editor in chief, John Hopkins and Lina Rukeviciute Editors. Migrating Art Academies, Vilnius Academy of Arts Press, Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artist's Association. Kaunas, 2014.

The first act of civil disobedience doesn’t come easily to most people. We are raised to be obedient; it requires considerable discernment to decide what matters enough to justify going against our sociable inclinations to conform,to not make waves, as my beloved Dad put it. The phone or the doorbell rings, and we answer it. The Star-Spangled Banner strikes up at a baseball game, and we rise to salute the flag and strain to reach the impossible notes of a ghastly anthem with its ‘‘bombs bursting in air,’’ its references to fire, destruction, blood, and the ‘‘pollution’’ of our enemies, the ‘‘terror of flight and the gloom of the grave.’’ But sing it we do, on cue. Then, suddenly, there is a tipping point that brings one to their senses. Following the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, something snapped back home in the United States. Some ordinary people began to sit tight during the singing of the national anthem in our ballparks. The bench sitters were pelted with hot dogs and mustard, with snow cones and soft ice cream. They were told to stand up like men, even if they were women. They were called traitors, scum, cowards, and Commies, and told to get out of America. But, like Horton the Elephant, they sat and they sat. They refused to remove their baseball caps or place their right hands over their hearts in a display of patriotic loyalty. That took a lot of moral courage.

Call for articles for a special issue of Studia Politica (Issue 3 of 2017)
Editor: PhD Lecturer, Caterina Preda (Department of Political Science, University of Bucharest) caterina.preda@fspub.unibuc.ro
http://www.studiapolitica.eu/

Creating for the state: the unions of artists and the state artists during the communist regimes in Eastern Europe

An understudied topic of the establishment, functioning, and demise of the communist regimes, the (creative) unions of artists in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union represent a fascinating topic of research, which best captures the relationship between the artists and the state. This relationship was not static, but evolved in time in the decades from the 1950s to the 1990s, and was further on transformed by the change of regime at the beginning of the 1990s. The state artists, those that accepted to create for the new communist states, were one of the main effects of the establishment of the new regimes. While public orders existed prior to 1945, their importance grew extensively in the decades of communism and the forms it took transformed the public function of art. We invite contributions on the topic of the unions of artists, the state artists (especially specific cases of artists), the types of refusals the artists were able to engage in, as well as on the transformations of this context after 1990/1991.