Enter
welcome
to the demonstration
"A new international is being sought through these crises"
Jacques Derrida
This project uses the metaphor of a demonstration to stage its narrative of visuality, revolution and decolonization. It follows Jacques Rancière in seeing such events as the moment where it is possible to stage the people (abstract). It imagines an anti-racist, internationalist demonstration. With a sense of history. But also an awareness that what has constituted history in recent times has often been a willingness to declare issues or genealogies to be over at a convenient moment.
Such as the independence of a formerly colonized nation. Like Algeria. At that moment, 1962, colonial responsibility stops. Or so they said. So now we hear from these "former" colonizers high-minded denunciation of "failed states" (like Algeria) and terrorism, as if these were due only to the moral weaknesses of the decolonized. Rather they are the product of long and entangled interfaces that we are going to walk through, remember, reanimate and (re)claim as our history.
Algeria
is a metonym for the interface of decolonization and
globalization
Whether or not you work "on" Algeria,
there is an "Algeria" in your work,
meaning that there is a place where the incomplete or failed processes of decolonization
and the formation of independent developing-world nations
intersects
with the homogenizing tendencies of globalization.
If the old International got many things wrong,
it got one important thing absolutely right:
a future will come into being across nations, not within them.
In the aftermath of the 2011 revolutions that emerged from a set of demonstrations in Tunisia to sweep across the region and indeed the world, this is a project about possible futures as well as recoverable pasts.
there is an "Algeria" in your work,
meaning that there is a place where the incomplete or failed processes of decolonization
and the formation of independent developing-world nations
intersects
with the homogenizing tendencies of globalization.
If the old International got many things wrong,
it got one important thing absolutely right:
a future will come into being across nations, not within them.
In the aftermath of the 2011 revolutions that emerged from a set of demonstrations in Tunisia to sweep across the region and indeed the world, this is a project about possible futures as well as recoverable pasts.
The Way Ahead
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