Life without Tragedy

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Life without Tragedy, 2019

Commissioned by @occny

#governorsisland #sculpture #kostisvelonis #debate #onassisfoundation #assembly #nyc

@zacharyschulmanphotography

Why Protest Tactics Spread Like Memes

When items like umbrellas and leaf blowers are subverted into objects of resistance, they become very shareable.

 

A video frame captured in Hong Kong in August 2019 shows a group of pro-democracy protesters, smoke pluming toward them, racing to place an orange traffic cone over a tear-gas canister. A video taken nine months later and 7,000 miles away, at a Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis, shows another small group using the same maneuver. Two moments, two continents, two cone placers, their postures nearly identical.

 

Images of protest spread on social media reveal many other matching moments from opposite sides of the world, and they often feature everyday objects wielded ingeniously.

Leaf blowers are used to diffuse clouds of tear gas; hockey sticks and tennis rackets are brandished to bat canisters back toward authorities; high-power laser pointers are used to thwart surveillance cameras; and plywood, boogie boards, umbrellas and more have served as shields to protect protesters from projectiles and create barricades.

An Xiao Mina, an author, internet researcher and alumnus of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, has studied these echoes. In the summer of 2014, when the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States that followed the police killing of Michael Brown were taking place, she noted that the protesters spoke a common language, even sharing the same hand gesture characterized by the chant “Hands up, don’t shoot.”

July 31, 2020

By Tracy Ma,

With Natalie Shutler,Written by Jonah Engel Bromwich,Video by 

Shane O’Neill

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/style/viral-protest-videos.html?smid=fb-share&fbclid=IwAR2e6tfmEe-K0v7RiFwrtFqXE5boHmrXCRQrlUR6vm1GmTzZ6wox6ek-FlI

Εφοδιαστικό έγγραφο μέλους της Φιλικής Εταιρείας

Εφοδιαστικό έγγραφο μέλους της Φιλικής Εταιρείας 

On Negative Capability: Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21, 27 December 1817

Hampstead Sunday
22 December 1818

My dear Brothers

I must crave your pardon for not having written ere this [ . . . ] [T]he excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth—Examine King Lear & you will find this exemplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness—The picture is larger than Christ rejected—I dined with Haydon the sunday after you left, & had a very pleasant day, I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith & met his two brothers with Hill & Kingston & one Du Bois, they only served to convince me, how superior humour is to wit in respect to enjoyment—These men say things which make one start, without making one feel, they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have a mannerism in their very eating & drinking, in their mere handling a Decanter—They talked of Kean & his low company—Would I were with that company instead of yours said I to myself! I know such like acquaintance will never do for me & yet I am going to Reynolds, on wednesday—Brown & Dilke walked with me & back from the Christmas pantomime.  I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

John Keats 

Cosmological archeology: Practices of archeology in contemporary artistic production

Cosmological archeology: Practices of archeology in contemporary artistic production

Every Time the Force Attaching me to the Earth is Greater than the one Lifting me into the Air, 2018 

Faidra Vasileiadou will develop a dialogue with Kostis Velonis about the practices of a “cosmological archeology” in contemporary artistic production. The body of these artists understands the “origin” of the technique not as something that constitutes a simplification of the form, which at the moment becomes more interesting with the usage of contemporary know-how. The archaic origin of the technique is not treated in terms of the initiation of some questions that have historically been answered, but rather than the “hidden discovery” that is now revealed and constitutes a philosophical fiction about the genesis of the world. With the support of Outset Greece

Saturday 20 April, 16.00-17.00

Snehta Residency, Athens

The Value of Freedom

Kostis Velonis, At the End of  Demonstration Day, 2009  
Wood, acrylic
Dimensions variable 

The concept of freedom is constantly changing. This exhibition charts its psychological, cultural, religious, political and legal evolution against the backdrop of historical developments, to arrive at a contemporary understanding of what freedom means. Works by more than fifty artists shed light on this complex issue from various angles. 

With its overlapping themes and cross-references, the exhibition weaves a tapestry of interdependencies and reciprocal influences between the individual and society, democracy and the economy, work and leisure, body and mind, nature and culture. Freedom is always relative to other factors and so has to be constantly renegotiated. For instance, one part of the exhibition looks at different forms of state governance that shape the community, while another area addresses the control of information as a crucial instrument of power. Some of the works highlight the fragility of freedom, while others explore identity-defining processes such as work. The public space is also the subject of some of the works. All in all, what emerges clearly is that the autonomy of the individual invariably goes hand in hand with social responsibility. 

With works by Zbynĕk Baladrán, Dara Birnbaum, Jordi Colomer, Carola Dertnig, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Harun Farocki, Karin Ferrari, Forensic Oceanography, John Gerrard, Johannes Gierlinger, Lola Gonzàlez, Johan Grimonprez, Igor Grubić, Eva Grubinger, Marlene Haring, Hiwa K, Leon Kahane, Šejla Kamerić, Alexander Kluge, Nina Könnemann, Laibach, Lars Laumann, Luiza Margan, Teresa Margolles, Isabella Celeste Maund, Anna Meyer, Aernout Mik, Matthias Noggler, Josip Novosel, Julian Oliver, Trevor Paglen, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Ivan Pardo, Oliver Ressler, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ashley Hans Scheirl, Christoph Schlingensief, Andreas Siekmann, Eva Stefani, Superflex, Pilvi Takala, Philipp Timischl, Milica Tomić, Betty Tompkins, Amalia Ulman, Kostis Velonis, Kara Walker, Stephen Willats, Anna Witt, Hannes Zebedin, Zentrum für politische Schönheit, Tobias Zielony and Artur Żmijeweski. 

Curated by Severin Dünser. 

THE VALUE OF FREEDOM 

19 September 2018 to 10 February 2019 

Belvedere 21

Arsenalstrasse 1 1030 Vienna 

https://www.belvedere.at/jart/prj3/belvedere/main.jart?rel=21erhaus_en&content-id=1439886441143&pid=1512156897738&reserve-mode=reserve 

Imagining a Letter from Robinson Crusoe: Experiencing Constant Becoming

Marc Z. Yang, Imagining a Letter from Robinson Crusoe: Experiencing Constant Becoming

International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 5, No. 8(1); August 2015

http://www.ijhssnet.com/journals/Vol_5_No_8_1_August_2015/19.pdf 

How to change the course of human history

For centuries, we have been telling ourselves a simple story about the origins of social inequality. For most of their history, humans lived in tiny egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Then came farming, which brought with it private property, and then the rise of cities which meant the emergence of civilization properly speaking. Civilization meant many bad things (wars, taxes, bureaucracy, patriarchy, slavery…) but also made possible written literature, science, philosophy, and most other great human achievements.

Almost everyone knows this story in its broadest outlines. Since at least the days of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it has framed what we think the overall shape and direction of human history to be. This is important because the narrative also defines our sense of political possibility. Most see civilization, hence inequality, as a tragic necessity. Some dream of returning to a past utopia, of finding an industrial equivalent to ‘primitive communism’, or even, in extreme cases, of destroying everything, and going back to being foragers again. But no one challenges the basic structure of the story.

There is a fundamental problem with this narrative.

It isn’t true.

First published in Eurozine

© David Graeber, David Wengrow / Eurozine

https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/

“Κωστής Βελώνης : A Puppet Sun" / Η εποχή των εικόνων

13.02.2018 ΕΡΤ2-Η εποχή των εικόνων “Κωστής Βελώνης : A Puppet Sun”. Συνέντευξη στην Κατερίνα Ζαχαροπούλου

http://webtv.ert.gr/ert2/i-epochi-ton-ikonon/13fev2018-i-epochi-ton-ikonon/

Between the Private and the Public, the Intimate and the Political

Kostis Velonis’s sculptural work often refers to historical events and art historical movements, while his markedly political work has at the same time a very personal aspect. He creates narratives characterized by the linking of personal stories with the reworking of past happenings. His personal experiences and reference points inflect his theoretical pursuits, and historical leaders and literary heroes often play a leading part in his newly invented scenarios. Velonis’s sculptures have a modest character, and they are usually made of wood, cardboard, small objects, and materials from the natural environment, which the artist finds and reuses in a process of bricolage. His works often transmit emotions such us loneliness, failure, melancholy, and uncertainty.

Kostis Velonis’s solo exhibition A Puppet Sun is organized by NEON and curated by Vassilis Oikonomopoulos. It is on view through January 14, 2018. It features twenty-five new works that the artist conceived for 11 Kaplanon Street in central Athens, responding to the history and architecture of the building. This neoclassical residence has a remarkable history. It was constructed in 1891 and first occupied by Pavlos Kountouriotis, the first president of the Second Hellenic Republic (1924–35, the second period in modern Greek history where Greece was not headed by a king). At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Zouzoula family acquired the residence, and the ground floor became the office of the politician Apostolos Zouzoulas, one of the founders of the People’s Party. Between the 1910s and the 1920s the building served as party headquarters. Later, during the authoritarian Metaxas Regime (1936–41), it was transformed into a residence for female students.

Kostis Velonis and Daphne Vitali in conversation

Mousse Magazine. Between the Private and the Public, the Intimate and the Political : Kostis Velonis

http://moussemagazine.it/private-public-intimate-political-kostis-velonis/

Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War

Lene Berg, Stalin by Picasso or Portrait of a Woman with Moustache, 2008. Façade-banner. Courtesy the artist.

In Amos Tutuola’s 1954 novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, the young protagonist is running away from slave-catchers when he accidently crosses the border of reality as he knows it. His flight from bondage, however, does not earn him freedom. Rather, he finds himself in an absurd, liminal world of conversing symbols and delirious phantasms, in which the entire regime of meaning-production is subject to tectonic shifts. Tutuola—whose idiosyncratic use of English language and Yoruba folklore propelled a battle of interpretations—would later become a member of the Mbari Clubs, the first of which was established in Ibadan in 1961. These cultural centers, initiated by the German-Jewish expatriate Ulli Beier, were a gathering place for a generation of African artists, writers, and musicians. Together, they spearheaded a renaissance of Yoruba culture.

One of the sponsors of the Mbari Clubs was the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), an organization founded in West Berlin in June 1950 by a group of writers driven to consolidate an "anti-totalitarian" intellectual community. Its ten-year anniversary was celebrated at the then newly inaugurated Kongresshalle, today’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt. With offices in more then 30 countries, the CCF subsidized countless cultural programs from Latin America to Africa and Southeast Asia, developing a network of journals, conferences, and exhibitions that advanced a "universal" language of modernism in literature, art, and music. By 1967, it was revealed that the CCF was secretly bankrolled by America’s espionage arm, the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA scandal confirmed the lingering suspicion that had trailed the CCF from the days of its origin: not quite an autonomous entity, the organisation had been enlisted in shoring up an anti-Communist consensus in the service of US hegemony during the Cultural Cold War. The disclosure destroyed the CCF’s reputation, exposing the ideological contradictions and moral ambiguities of advocating freedom and transparency by means that are themselves outside of democratic accountability.

The term "parapolitics" refers to the use of soft power in the Cold War. Employing the history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom as an optical device, the project brings Picasso’s famous dictum  "art is a lie that tells truth" into relation with the work of an intelligence agency whose "art lies in concealing the means by which it is achieved."

In the shadowy underside of liberal consensus, freedom appears as always contingent on its foreclosures. Tracing tectonic shifts in intellectual affiliations across political conflict lines through the 20th century, the exhibition explores artistic strategies of engagement and subversion. It underlines how the play with meaning in an increasingly conceptually and semantically oriented world of art production has acted on the assertion of an endangered, precarious autonomy. Within the choreography of parapolitics, the canon of the Cold War modernism becomes a bush of ghosts.

Parapolitics brings together archival documents and artworks from the 1930s to the present by artists that prefigure and reflect the ideological and formal struggles arising from the cultural Cold War, but also works by contemporary artists critically reassessing the normalized narratives of modernism. It features magazines such as Der Monat (Germany), Encounter (UK), Sasanggye (South Korea), Quest (India), Africa South (South Africa), Black Orpheus (Nigeria), Transition(Uganda / Ghana), The New African (South Africa), Hiwar(Lebanon), and Mundo Nuevo (Latin America), that were either initiated or at times supported by the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

With works by Art & Language, Doug Ashford, Michael Baers, Antonina Baever, Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck (with Media Farzin and Paolo Gasparini), Robert Barry, Romare Bearden, Samuel Beckett, Lene Berg, Broomberg and Chanarin, Fernando Bryce, Daniel Buren, Luis Camnitzer, Alice Creischer, Didactic Exhibition, Liu Ding, Charles and Ray Eames, Miklos Erdély, Peter Friedl, Liam Gillick, Sheela Gowda, Philip Guston, Gruppe Gummi K, Max de Haas, Chia Wei Hsu, Iman Issa, Voluspa Jarpa, David Lamelas, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, İlhan Mimaroğlu, Moiseyev Dance Company, Museum of American Art in Berlin, Solomon Nikritin, Irving Norman, Guillermo Nuñez, Branwen Okpako, Boris Ondreička, Nam June Paik, Décio Pignatari, Howardena Pindel, Sigmar Polke, Rebecca H. Quaytman, Walid Raad, Steve Reich, Ad Reinhardt, Gerhard Richter, Faith Ringgold, Norman Rockwell, Peter Roehr, Martha Rosler, Charles Shaw, Yashas Shetty, Francis Newton Souza, Frank Stella, The Otolith Group, Endre Tót, Suzanne Treister, Twins Seven Seven, Josip Vaništa, Wolf Vostell, and Susanne Wenger.

An accompanying conference titled "Freedom in the Bush of Ghosts" will be held on December 15 and 16, 2017 at Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

Curated by Anselm Franke, Nida Ghouse, Paz Guevara, and Antonia Majaca.

https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2017/parapolitics/parapolitics_start.php

Kwaito's Promise

In mid-1990s South Africa, apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela was elected president, and the country’s urban black youth developed kwaito—a form of electronic music (redolent of North American house) that came to represent the post-struggle generation. In this book, Gavin Steingo examines kwaito as it has developed alongside the democratization of South Africa over the past two decades. Tracking the fall of South African hope into the disenchantment that often characterizes the outlook of its youth today—who face high unemployment, extreme inequality, and widespread crime—Steingo looks to kwaito as a powerful tool that paradoxically engages South Africa’s crucial social and political problems by, in fact, seeming to ignore them.
           
Politicians and cultural critics have long criticized kwaito for failing to provide any meaningful contribution to a society that desperately needs direction. As Steingo shows, however, these criticisms are built on problematic assumptions about the political function of music. Interacting with kwaito artists and fans, he shows that youth aren’t escaping their social condition through kwaito but rather using it to expand their sensory realities and generate new possibilities. Resisting the truism that “music is always political,” Steingo elucidates a music that thrives on its radically ambiguous relationship with politics, power, and the state.

Gavin Steingo, Kwaito's Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa, University of Chicago Press, 2016 http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/K/bo23290913.html  

Unlearning Alphabet

Untitled (Unlearning Alphabet Series) 2017

Wood, plywood, acrylic

250 x 80 x 12 cm

For a New Liberty

Murray N. Rothbard proposes a once-and-for-all escape from the two major political parties, the ideologies they embrace, and their central plans for using state power against people. Libertarianism is Rothbard's radical alternative that says state power is unworkable and immoral and ought to be curbed and finally abolished

https://mises.org/sites/default/files/For%20a%20New%20Liberty%20The%20Libertarian%20Manifesto_3.pdf

Whither anarchy: freedom as non-domination

Which institutions are best suited to realising freedom? This is a question recently asked by the republican political theorist Philip Pettit. 

Anarchists, by contrast to republicans, argue that the modern nation-state and the institution of private property are antithetical to freedom. According to anarchists, these are historic injustices that are structurally dominating. If you value freedom as non-domination, you must reject both as inimical to realising this freedom.

But what is freedom as non-domination? In a nutshell, by a line of thinking most vocally articulated by Pettit, I’m free to the degree that I am not arbitrarily dominated by any other. I am not free if someone can arbitrarily interfere in the execution of my choices.

If I consent to a system of rules or procedures, anyone that then invokes these rules against me cannot be said to be curtailing my freedom from domination. My scope for action might be constrained, but since I have consented to the rules that now curtail my freedom, I am not subject to arbitrary domination.

https://theconversation.com/whither-anarchy-freedom-as-non-domination-60776 

Le fauteuil du marquis de Sade aux enchères

Une centaine de manuscrits, lettres et objets, ayant appartenu au sulfureux marquis, dont le fauteuil sur lequel il écrivit la plupart de ses oeuvres et de rares pièces de théâtre, sont mis en vente mercredi en France.

Les pièces proposées par la maison de vente parisienne Drouot proviennent des rares documents sauvés des flammes à la mort de Sade le 2 décembre 1814.

Ce qui ne fut pas brûlé fut mis dans un coffre et scellé derrière des étagères de la bibliothèque du château familial de Condé-en-Brie, dans le nord-est de la France.

«De ce jour un tabou total s'est abattu sur la famille», se souvient Thibault de Sade, un descendant du marquis dont les parents ont redécouvert les oeuvres de leur ancêtre peu de temps après la fin de la Seconde guerre mondiale. Devenu «un complet inconnu», le nom même de Sade avait été «gratté sur l'arbre généalogique».

«Toute leur vie, nos parents se sont battus pour faire connaître Sade, contre les préjugés, contre les mensonges et pour la vérité (...) Ils ont donné mission à leur cinq enfants de continuer ce combat pour la connaissance», poursuit Thibault de Sade à l'origine de la vente.

Parmi les pièces proposées figure le fauteuil du marquis de Sade (entre 40'000 et 50'000 euros). C'est dans ce fauteuil, en partie d'époque Louis XIII, que Sade écrivit la plupart de ses textes (y compris quand il fut enfermé à Vincennes, la Bastille ou Charenton).

Un tableau, attribué à Jean-Marc Nattier et représentant le père du marquis est estimé entre 30'000 et 40'000 euros. Comme son fauteuil, ce tableau accompagna Sade de cachot en cachot.

http://www.24heures.ch/news/standard/Le-fauteuil-du-marquis-de-Sade-aux-encheres/story/22105867

Cartilla Socialista -Republicana

Plotino Constantino Rhodakanaty, Cartilla Socialista -Republicana, 1883 

http://www.juridicas.unam.mx/publica/librev/rev/signos/cont/3/fyd/fyd8.pdf

Obras de Plotino C. Rhodakanaty

Obras de Plotino C. Rhodakanaty. Edicion, Prolongo y notas de Carlo Illades, Recopilacion Maria Esther Reyes Duarte, UNAM, 1998

http://148.206.53.230/revistasuam/signoshistoricos/include/getdoc.php?id=164&article=11&mode=pdf

Πλωτίνος Ροδοκανάκης

Τέο Ρόμβος, Πλωτίνος Ροδοκανάκης – Ένας Έλληνας Αναρχικός, Βιογραφία, Ηλέκτρα, Α΄ έκδοση 2005, Β΄ έκδοση 2008, σελ. 234

https://romvos.wordpress.com/βιβλία/plotinos-rodokanakis/

The Door in the Sky

“The Truman Show” directed by Peter Weir and written by Andrew Niccol, 1998.