Stop the monster
Eva Ďurovec
2022
John: Well, Crotona Commune had these old heads, like nationalists and commies, who were always showing up everywhere and always talking about how we should all work together. They had these, I do not know, agendas? Platforms? Ideas of how things should work in the future? The dance scene I was in initially had none of that. We just took care of each other and believed in that. …By 2050 you would start hearing like young thugs and tweakers repeating something they had heard a commie from the Crotona Commune say, like they were really thinking about it. I was kind of one of those kids too. .. But I’d also argue with them.
(Everything for Everyone, An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072, M. E. O’Brien, & Eman Abdelhadi, 2022, Common Notions)
Food and employment for people in rural areas – where most of the world’s hunger is concentrated – remains unaddressed. Hunger becomes politically significant only when the poor come to the cities and turn it into anger, and when there is a threat of an uprising to challenge the laws of cheap nature. Here, in the bourgeoisie’s interest in this law and in its need to keep the workers quiet, we find the origin of what has come to be known as the Green Revolution.
(A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, Rajeev Charles Patel & Jason W. Moore, 2020, Verso)
The war of WE versus THEM is generated not so much by the mass media controlled by the powerful, but by algorithms controlled by the powerful, which feeds us, also thanks to identity politics and misused technology, with new and new THEM. The problems and solutions are pre-determined and are being handed out like a piece of meat to the starving in the WEANDTHEM group.
Paulo Freire’s actual oppressor, has successfully made himself invisible. He is everywhere and nowhere like the Big Three who have control of 90 percent of the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index companies including companies investing in the nuclear arms industry. Diving into the exploration of who the real THEY are, depends on free time, finances, health, luck but also on skin color, gender, age, or family and community background. It is rare to find these kinds of dives in schools because there, the spaces of exploration are occupied precisely by the isolated spaces of identities. Surviving the pandemic period, though differently by different classes, has nevertheless revealed new possibilities and developed imaginations about possible futures (think of the downward emissions curve, for example) and our abilities to change the oppressor-set trend.
The timeline passes through three bodies plotted in pots: my body 1981 – 2040, my grandmother’s body 1921 – 1980, and her grandmother’s body 1860 – 1920. It traces the trend of disaster from managed capitalism, to unmanaged capitalism, and the ecological catastrophe that goes with it. The mattresses serve as the basis for magical voodoo dolls, tracing movements, methods of civil resistance against oppressors. It reflects on the role of the artist researcher, presenting unreadable insights that come at the expense of others. It tries to calculate how many lives must be paid for one’s own exploration, because education is freedom, but at the same time this freedom is built on the bones of others.
Supported using public funding from the Slovak Arts Council and Neustart Kultur.