#11- 35: Language at/of the border

Posted in #11- 35 Language at/of the border | 0 comments

35_border

 

The idea for this issue arose when we begin working on our film A Border Musical, whose screenplay is also printed here. This film is based on a study of the situation on both sides of the Russian-Norwegian border: we were interested in how a range of differences, which inevitably serve as sources of conflict in border areas, shape the subjectivity of people in daily contact with each other.

Borderlands always aggravate differences – political and social, behavioral, linguistic and economic, and so on. The border’s physicality, particularly in the form of rigid paramilitary zones impeding the free circulation of people, causes anyone who becomes caught up in their force fields to re-examine the world and themselves. On the map of the world, such areas have always been not only the focus of geopolitical tensions, but also special habitats encouraging the development of new forms of language, behavior and culture. The border is a place for experiment, a zone of mobility and change.

The history of state borders has always been a history of violence: a history of wars, militarization, securitization, bureaucratic control, biopolitical regulation, forced displacement, flight and migration. Historically, state borders are shaped by the balance of violence. The winners dictate them to the losers, without taking into account either real geography or ethnicity. Borders separate “us” from “them,” and these divisions are set down in documents determining state loyalties and citizenship. Paradoxically, borders, which are always artificial forms, are an essential factor of existence, shaping not only the lives of people, but also impacting the natural environment and the animal world.

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Editorial // Autonomy as a Space for Action

Posted in #2 Autonomy Zones | 0 comments

Is free action possible? What are its boundaries? Such questions, which address the issue of autonomy, are fundamental to human existence. Yet the idea of autonomy as such only arises when an individual or a group finds itself in conflict with its surroundings. In this conflict, the self’s position needs to be reinformed; a means of action must be chosen. In this sense, the starting point for a discourse on the autonomy of action does not only ask the question of freedom but also addresses the issue of responsibility.

Today, as new forms of political resistance emerge, the question of the human being’s autonomy, be it civic or artistic, is the first and foremost question that one should ask. In discussing the possibilities for autonomous projects, contemporary leftwing consciousness develops concrete strategies and tactics of overcoming neoliberalism’s status-quo.

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Dmitry Vilensky // What is to be done? (Editorial)

Posted in #1 What is to be done? | 0 comments

“…a person should always endeavor to be as radical as reality itself.”

V.I.Lenin in conversation with the Dadaist Marq in Zurich
(Dada and Poets, R. Motherwell)

 

The ability to simply think up the question, “What to do?” came about not long ago, when it suddenly became clear that the time had come for serious and responsible expression: all playful-ironical modes of representation seemed openly obscene. It’s still early to talk about the complete ideological overcoing over the postmodern, but we can already certify that the postmodern has become impossible on a purely aesthetic level.In this situation, it is again necessary to define the avant-garde position in art.Art gains its historical perspective only in coordination with the appearance of a global political avant-garde and the relevant theory that describes it.In recent years, radical protest movements have revealed fundamentally new positions.For the new artistic avant-garde, these movements provide political reference points.Such was the atmosphere at the time of the Revolution, and now, again, the inescapable sensation of change—social, visual and political—is in the air.

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