projects

The articulation of resistance: activism and activist speech practices

Anja Kanngieser / Manuela Zechner

How do some of the different modes of rhetoric, apparent in contemporary political artist and activist circles, translate into action? How do different political artists, activists and collectives utilize speech and language in the construction of their identity and belief systems? What are some of the effects of particular speech taxonomies upon how political artists and activists view their activity and the activity of others? What are the benefits of examining speech in the political artist and activist context: i.e. how much does speech effect action? When does speech become a speech act? How can examining speech and its impacts upon action help investigations on new and inventive modes of artistic and political praxis?

These questions will be conducted through a methodology developed in the Future Archive project, in which discursive techniques are used in order to extend divergent “activist” discourses into a future by constructing “fictive” conversations, whereby people come to inhabit self-imagined spaces of futurity. These conversations act as starting points for various modes of enquiry into the use of artistic and activist vocabularies, and are offered for viewing, development and discussion via the online archival platform futurearchive.org.

This platform becomes a site for linking concepts and ways of speaking and relating their potential for social/ political change, by critically reflecting or extending them. An example might be; via a conversation in a proposed future where nation states are a phenomenon of the past, the concept of the border becomes subject to critical examination and a certain shift of its use in a discourse is proposed. For instance, what kinds of borders might a post-national world have? What can we see happening to the more abstract notion of border?

In line with this methodology, the work undertaken in the proposed project aims to tie together activist speech, rhetoric and practices, in which imaginings of the future are constructed as a methodological tool to expose and analyze the relations and disjunctions that occur in such processes. Like the aim of the wider Future Archive, this process may become useful to deconstruct and transform popular discourses in order to explore how these can come to function in present and future relational artistic, social and political contexts.  The project aims to research, generate and share tools for developing performative and transformative ways of thinking and speaking, that can assist in the creation of spaces in which exchange and debate can occur on issues produced in and by conditions of late capitalist society.  Influenced by an acute awareness of increasing social, ecological and economic crisis, and in affinity with critical and theoretical investigations on the intersections between aesthetics and politics, the project aims to interrogate the traversals between language and socio-political change.

1. May 24-28th 2007, summit on non-aligned initiatives in education culture:
   At the education summit, we would like to conduct a series of open, spontaneous and public interviews with participants, using the discursive architecture of the future archive project (see below) and contributing towards the future archive as well as summit documentation.
   interview edits will be made available as v2v (on futurearchive.org and summit website)
2. June 3-7th 2007, G8 Heiligendamm:
   further interviews, held throughout the summit on an open and spontaneous basis
   interviews edited for broadcast on kein.tv and made available on futurearchive.org
3. June 18-31st 2007, London:
   evaluation and editing of overall project
4. 27 June 2007, 6pm, red room, Chelsea College of Art, London;
   project presentation and discussion hosted by Critical Practice Research Cluster