The Pixelated Revolution
by Rabih Mroué
Informal lecture, 60 min
« The Syrian protestors are recording their own deaths. » This is the opening sentence of The Pixelated Revolution, a succession of videos during which we witness a sniper and a soldier from the regime’s army firing at the cameraman. These videos show the moments of eye contact between shooter and cameraman, when the weapon’s line of fire intersects with the camera lens.
This informal video-assisted talk looks firstly at the way Syrians film « here and now » ; reflects on the relationship between this documentary act and death; and questions the way we perceive these videos « now, but over there ».…
Given in English, this talk was commissioned and produced by and for dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel, in coproduction with Berlin Documentary Forum – HKW/Berlin 2012, the 2010 Spalding Gray Award (Performing Space 122) in New York, The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh , On the Boards in Seattle and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis
Rabih Mroué, The Pixelated Revolution, 2012
Imperformativity
by Stephen Wright
Lecture, 45 min
The appeal of the performative is readily understandable: it reclaims the subject’s power to act from the representational paradigm that holds it captive. But given its inflationary use over the last few years, we have to acknowledge that the forces of strategic rationality have taken performativity over, making it their principal mode of capture and accumulation; they summon us continuously to perform our subjectivities, the better to capture and monetise them, and even to «perform opposition» – thus sparing ourselves, maybe, the hard work of real opposition. Faced with this vista of all-pervading performativity, radical imperformativity has long been the refuge of poachers, idlers, deserters, squatters and other practitioners of the bare minimum; and suddenly the refusal to let oneself be dispossessed of one’s power to not act – of one’s determination to beat the mechanisms of performative capture and still take action behind the scenes – appears as the sole realistic modus operandi.