Radical Imagination
Research project: Imagination beyond Representation – Political Representation in Arts
Call for collaboration! Researchers, writers, artists, activists, students, workers
Contact us for suggestions, proposals and other ideas: radeducollective@gmail.com
For some time now we have been considering the questions about the political potential of a work of art, or, put somewhat differently, about freeing the revolutionary potential of art from its social and political forms of representation and from the limitations of its communicative medium. When we consider the political potential of an artwork, we are usually attentive to the possible changes in the social field that this work can stimulate or evoke. We think about the devices in an artwork (such as the motives, the narratives) that contribute towards raising the political awareness in a social and economic order. We can even say that it is all about certain political pedagogy. But what we are actually talking about are the ways politics condition art and not about art’s emancipation from the representational regime. What we are interested in, then, is something else: the unmediated experiences, acts of creation, which are not yet formalized knowledge but thoughts in their purest formation, passing the field which has been liberated from the institutionalized rationality. Translations of these operations into the so called representative regime of art are never unproblematic, since they stimulate anxiety, incite new reactions and interruptions of the already-known and if not, they remain hidden until they reach their “extractive conditions”. But how does one recognize the moment of moving beyond the subjective territory of the “not yet” into the plane of transversal linkage? How can radical imagination contribute towards crossing that threshold in question, bridging the gap between subjectivity and the representative regime of art? How do these “translations” differ in various historical, geographical, political and economical contexts? And could it be that some things really are unrepresentable? (see for example debate on this particular question between Wajcman and Didi-Huberman) In order to attempt to answer these questions we should not only reconsider the meaning of imagination and creativity but also the long tradition of conformity to forms of expression and content which resulted in representation dominating our way of thinking. The research will therefore aim to answer these questions in three consecutive steps:
- A study (interviews with the artists, comparative analyses of various artistic works, types of artistic “translations” and valorization of such artworks from different periods: for example the avant-garde arts of the 60’s and 70’s in Eastern Europe, contemporary art scene in the Middle East, etc.).
- A research on different aspects of political representation under specific political, social and economic conditions in Palestine, Lebanon, Israel and the Balkan states.
- An international symposium and a publication in 2011.
“There is a limit at which the exercise of an art, whatever it be, becomes an insult to misfortune.”
Maurice Blanchot
Attached Files:
- Tomislav Gotovac: Lying Naked on the Asphalt
performance, 13.11.1981, photo: Ivan Posavec
- Femmes Algeriennes
from the book by Marc Garanger, 1960