A WINDUP CLOCK…
…DETONATOR OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
There is a distinction between fear and terror.
Fear is an alarm in the face of danger, it incites a reaction.
Terror, in contrast, is a different experience; it paralyzes those who experience it.
Terror becomes internalized and is more effective than any prison.
It confines us to living with panic as a lodger and provokes suspicious visions on the sight of what is foreign.
The paranoid grimaces of the neighbour turn into an everyday theatricality.
When the night overlaps with the day: a circle of stars over a blue background
Time stops after the explosion.
A confusing setting
Something is happening with the calendar. A page is missing, silence.
Then, stained pages that repeat themselves year after year
like the structure of an unfinished simphony.
Something has changed in the air and under the ground:
In the subway stations men in black, dogs,
Sounds that explode from mobile phones.
They walk among us, they watch us.
The dogs come closer, they sniff the luggage.
The men in black keep on walking.
Now they head toward a group of foreigners that is us.
What are they looking for?
Mobile phones, prepaid cards, sports bags, video tapes?
NEXT STOP: DEATH
Behind a desk one can see a map of the planet punctured with pins with different coloured heads.
The image of the map resembles a doll used to cause something on a third party from a distance.
Like those figures used in rituals by “sects of religious fanatics” or by groups that use “witchcraft.”
The room is now empty.
The map on the wall is still punctured.
The objectives, the targets, points on a map…
The world remains restless, while enormous bars rise around each being.
A windup mechanism that will activate itself at a given time.
The frailty of life in the face of movement becomes tangible.
Here, while the new societies prepare to raise old walls
with cheap labour and information bricks.
The globe turns around its axis, trying clumsily to dodge the clock’s hands.
BANG: ¡Trrori$t$ !
We are all Terrorists: That is the image.
The figure of “terrorism” used as an element to justify war, genocide and repression against peoples.
A concept, an image that gives visibility to the crime of being “suspicious of everything,” and criminalizes in a uniform
and generalized way non-Western societies and the regime’s opponents.
In the “War against Terror” anything goes: razing houses to the ground and despising religious beliefs,
torturing the “enemy,” humiliating them and cutting short any possibility of free life.
Murdering somebody for “carrying a face”: shooting and seeing who it was only afterwards, turning that into an image.
A unilateral, totalitarian, sensationalist, and effective image.
The mass media weave an intersubjective network where insecurity is a war of all against all.
Now simultaneously all of us read the same information, we all watch the same image.
The upcoming Wars cover the future with a cloak of darkness.
The tanks thirsty for fuel advance through the night carrying with them all the cultural stigmata from that “other side” of the world.
The new lines of expansion of the map of Empire will be written with blood and petroleum. Images of war and terrorism, flooding the streets, bombarding the screens, entering
homes, controlling the neuralgic points of the planet, mobility, transportation, communication. The message is in other languages but we can still read it: a terrorist image.
That is why we proclaim the need for a critical intervention into social reality and the present political context. An international coordination of poetic-political actions that subtly
put into evidence the mechanisms for forming the stereotype of the “terrorist enemy.”
To look for the social negative, to question and put in crisis, from the terrain of the symbolic and from artistic-political action, the use and manipulation of the concept of
“terrorism” for dominating and harrassing entire societies.
In the re-ordering of the Planet, the pieces are moved with ambitious precision. The Empire advances seeking to dominate every existing market, launching battles for
strategic territorial spaces, and natural resources, but also seeking to impose Cultural domination at a global level. A single symbolic system, a single Culture constructed by
the global market, is the future of this threat.
But this will be another battle, a battle for Cultural emancipation.
The liberation of thought, the domination of an alien economic, political, and cultural system, the marketing of incomprehensible signs and subliminal messages that bombard
us from the screens every day…
…The time has come to struggle for freedom..
We will do it with our poetic weapons
And with more real ones if necessary!
ETCETERA… is a collective founded by Federico Zukrfeld and Loreto Guzman at 1998 in Buenos Aires. Members are artists from fields such as poetry, drama, visual arts, music and political activists. ETCETERA is the commitment and presence in social conflicts and participates with its works, manifestos and actions in the protest demonstrations.