#counter practice

"digital media archive of social movements appeared following the massive urban protests known as Gezi Park Resistance. By collectivizing knowledge and memory and operating as a space of empowerment bak.ma radicalizes the politics of the archive and indicates possibilities for creating a living memory of the social movements."

Hannah Höch

Anarchism is not a fixed, self-enclosed social system but rather a definite trend in the historic development of mankind, which, in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to become broader and to affect wider circles in more manifold ways. For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account. The less this natural development of man is influenced by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the more will it become the measure of the intellectual culture of the society in which it has grown.

I think of Sillage as an olfactory public artwork. This project is a challenge to conventional notions of what makes art “public.” In public art, the idea of collective memory is often considered when designing monuments and memorials. Throughout the world, the built environment is full of objects that claim to embody a specific public’s memory. However, as opposed to embodying collective memory, many such objects have been criticized for displacing it. Through their permanent materials, masculine nature, and rigid meaning, conventional monuments have been challenged for being impotent, symbolic markers unable to adapt to a public that is constantly in flux. With the olfactory public artwork, this is inverted. “Counter- monuments” like Sillage are highly ephemeral, physically unimposing, and capable of generating discourse chiefly because they provoke memory. As a form of socially engaged art, the ephemeral nature of smell calls for public dialogue now, because the smell itself will soon be a memory.

an amazing "research" project

Renzo Martens - Enjoy Poverty