The Garden of Dystopian Pleasures

ABSTRACT

This article offers a reflection on the authors’ curation of (Dousos and Ieropoulos) and participation in (de Senna and Pfützenreuter) The Garden of Dystopian Pleasures, a performance festival that took place at the Athens School of Fine Arts in 2018. Dousos and Ieropoulos present their thoughts around the need to curate such an event in the first place, discussing the context within which they operate, the Athenian art scene, while making the case that ambiguity as a political and poetical tool must not be surrendered to the right. De Senna and Pfützenreuter discuss their experiences in creating and performing right-wing personas that blur the lines between what is real and what is performed; engaging in strategies of overidentification, they initiate a discussion around the ethics and role of critical artistic practice in response to contemporary right-wing radicalisation and aesthetics. Mirroring the curatorially experimental nature of the festival, the contributors speak from multiple positionalities. As such, the structure and tone of the article attempt a destabilisation of the form of a conventional academic paper, avoiding an overall, singular summing-up of the positions presented, and allowing for shifts in register.

KEYWORDS:

• Overidentification
• ambiguity
• curation
• post-truth
• Athens

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A collective of artists, academics and performers based in Athens, London and Berlin. Two years after ‘The Garden of Dystopian Pleasures’, the ministry co-organised a conference at the Freud Museum London focusing on Psychoanalysis and Post-truth. See: https://www.freud.org.uk/event/psychoanalysis-post-truth-us-election-special

2. We have to acknowledge that neither ‘post-truth’ nor ‘post-truth era’ have accurate and satisfying definitions. Can we take as a starting point Matthew D’Ancona’s (2017) metaphoric construction, an era defined by: ‘the declining value of truth as society’s reserve currency, an abandoned gold standard of verifiability’? We supplement this not only with the observation that this is a period when liberal media orthodoxies were challenged by the rise of alternative digital outlets and grassroots (mis)information, but also with the idea that there is a truth, which for the subject divided by language is always lost, yet always to be pursued. It is this truth that, we shall argue, is at stake in the confrontation with a dystopian pleasure.

3. The use of a small g for greece and greek in FYTA’s writing is an antinationalist gesture.

4. This article has been long in the making and we’d like to thank those who discussed our main arguments and provided critical feedback; Daniel Mapp and Jordan Osserman, in particular, offered valuable comments throughout this process.

5. An in-depth discussion on the politics of documenta 14 can be found in Audrey Schmidt’s interview with Fil Ieropoulos for the Melbourne-based art magazine Minority Report (Schmidt 2018a).

6. The public programme of the exhibition was named ‘the parliament of bodies’ and the initial cluster of events ‘34 exercises of freedom’ – including a plethora of artworks and discussions that could be largely grouped under these characteristics. Art historian Kostis Stafylakis offers his account of some of these phenomena (Stafylakis 2017).

7. Greece after the 2008 financial crisis was pressured by the EU, ECB and the IMF to adopt a brutal austerity program leading to political turbulence that culminated with the ascendance of left-wing party SYRIZA to power. In this context, greece was often valorised by the European left as an example of people revolting against neoliberal policies imposed by bureaucratic technocrats.

8. Translation of the original in German (Balzer 2017).

9. (Plessas 2017).

10. (Sprinkle 2017).

11. (The Cooperativist Society 2017).

12. (Cruz et al. 2017); for more on indigeneity and documenta 14 see also (Schmidt 2018a).

13. At the time, Golden Dawn, the greek neo-Nazi party was the third biggest political party in parliament and its rhetoric was largely a narrative of ‘resistance’.

14. While this is a rhetorical question here, Helena Smith writing in The Guardian offers a compelling response (Smith 2017).

15. (Simoniti 2018).

16. In a notable Screen Rant review of the classic horror film The Shining, the representation of abuse for example is coded as problematic as it doesn’t address the problems of domestic violence and child abuse (‘Why The Shining Hasn’t Aged Well’ 2020).

17. We are aware that such generalizations have their own limitations but for the sake of argument let’s accept this schematic grouping.

18. FYTA have reflected on how the demand for ‘free speech’ has been weaponised by right-wing politics of the past decade in their durational performance n(EURO)logy at Bâtiment d’Art Contemporain in Geneva. In this performance a series of blood soaked ‘Je Suis Voltaire’ posters functioned as the backdrop for a xenophobic monologue delivered by two doctors / cardinals. More info around this artwork in Rahul Rao’s article ‘Critique In Hysterical Times.’ The Disorder Of Things (blog), 7 November 2017. https://thedisorderofthings.com/2017/11/07/critique-in-hysterical-times

19. In Bersani’s words: ‘The ultimate logic of MacKinnon’s and Dworkin’s critique of pornography – and, however parodistic this may sound, I really don’t mean it as a parody of their views – would be the criminalization of sex itself until it has been reinvented’ (Bersani 2010, 20).

20. It’s worth pointing out that in our analysis, alienation follows a Lacanian orientation, where the term describes a split, an internal alterity, a becoming ‘alien’ or ‘other’ to oneself. And in that sense, there is no ‘over-coming’ alienation as it is a fundamental pre-condition for the subjectification process as such; alienation is constitutive of the subject’s becoming. We found an illuminating discussion around the Lacanian definition of alienation and its relation to notions of freedom in Graham Smith’s (unpublished) MA dissertation titled ‘Alienation, Separation and the Question of Freedom in Lacan’s Seminar XI’.

21. Although it is interesting to see this idea, which reminds us of Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1974), getting traction again.

22. For a more comprehensive discussion of the tension between notions of ethics and common moralism see also: Lacan, Jacques, Dennis Porter, and Jacques-Alain Miller. 2015. The ethics of psychoanalysis, 1959–1960.

23. Colloquialism referring to neo-fascists.

24. Stemming from internet subcultures, a term to describe those who take controversial positions in order to provoke – those who enjoy taking the most contrarian position in every debate.

25. Besides our work as political provocateurs, we have participated over the years in queer arts projects that focus on other aspects of the political struggle, involving community outreach and empowerment. Does that make us unfaithful to the great cause of political provocation?

26. See for example Laibach’s performance in North Korea, captured in the documentary, Liberation Day (Olte and Traavik 2017).

27. As, for example, in the case of Donald Trump who can pose as a totalitarian leader and at the same time as an insincere clown – and the second does not undermine the legitimacy or effects of the first.

28. Two artists whose work can be argued to share a similar approach to this overidentification/disidentification fusion are Pascal Lièvre and Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay. Their video ‘Patriotic’ is a hyper-camp yet harsh and pertinent critique of propaganda aesthetics, in which the George W. Bush Patriotic Act of 2001 is set to a synthpop cover of Celin Dion’s Love Theme from the film Titanic. In the end result, the viewer is presented with what could be a homoerotic, patriotic US army pinkwashing nightmare.

29. This differentiation between author, performer, character and the third-person-view are a concession to the readability of this text. The ambiguity between the performer and the scientist-persona is essential for the show, in regards to biography, rhetoric, facts and the production of fake news.

30. The following unreferenced quotes are quotes from the show.

31. The cosmist movement started in the second half of the 19th century. It aimed to fulfil the promises of Christianity (e.g. immortality) by modern science. The movement strongly influenced the intellectual debates at the turn of the century and became very important during the Russian revolution. Even though the movement was opposed by Lenin, it strongly promoted the almost religious belief in technology in the Soviet Union.

32. https://www.amnesty.org/en/get-involved/take-action/greece-justice-for-zak

33. Speaking about privilege: the fact, that I (as a white cis-male German) am hardly affected by everyday discrimination and even played with that privileged role probably increased the unease for many spectators.

34. In spite of these protests, in 2014 President Rousseff was re-elected; in hindsight, it is however clear that the seeds that eventually led to her impeachment process in 2015–16 had been planted.

35. The Portuguese parts of the video were subtitled in Greek. In 2020, the video was selected for exhibition at the Art Athina (digital) Art Fair. At that point, the left-wing Syriza government had come and gone, Golden Dawn leaders were in jail and Greece had returned to the ‘normality’ of the right-wing Nea Dimocratia government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis. The fact that Art Athina chose to include the piece in its 2020 exhibition is a reminder that all is not well under the sun. The video can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE6fJrcMjhs&feature=youtu.be

36. Bolsonaro went on to win the election in the second round with 57.8 million votes (55.5% of valid ballots).

37. Indeed, in April 2019, I performed a new iteration of the character, at the University of Surrey, at an event called ‘Between Myth and Memory: Contemporary Politics and the Performance of History’. The presentation, in English, and titled ‘Mythologising and overidentification: reflections of a Brazilian fascist abroad’, took the shape of a speech at an academic symposium in which ‘Pedro’ confesses to being confused after having read Žižek … In this performance, his accent in English slips between Greek, Brazilian and British, as his identity as an international ultra-nationalist starts to unravel. Even so (and not unlike in Pfutzenreuter’s DUSTOPIA performance at the Garden), I was approached by an audience member who believed I had actually attempted to join Golden Dawn.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pedro de Senna

Pedro de Senna is a Brazilian theatre practitioner and academic. He is a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Theatre Theory and Practice at Middlesex University, London. His current research focuses on the relationships between Futures Studies and Performance Studies; and between theatre, education and society. He has published on theatre translation and adaptation, directing and dramaturgy, and disability aesthetics in performance. In his practice, Pedro has extensive experience as a director, workshop facilitator, performer and dramaturg. He is an associate director with SignDance Collective, a disabled-led dance-theatre company using sign languages as a basis for their choreographic practice.

Richard Pfützenreuter is an independent artist and dramaturg. He studied theatre in Berlin and has worked for various theatres and performance groups over the last 15 years. With the group Panzerkreuzer Rotkäppchen he regularly explores themes of the post-GDR. His solo performances primarily explore the connections between ideology, body and control in late capitalism.

FYTA is a conceptual audiotextual performance duo, consisting of Fil Ieropoulos [Buckinghamshire New University] and Foivos Dousos . Since 2012 they have participated in a number of events as performers, but also as curators. They were founding members of the queer music label Fytini (with over 30 releases), the performance art platform Sound Acts (presenting the work of 80+ artists in three years) and the activist space AMOQA with various collaborators from the queer scene. In 2021 they are presenting the video opera ‘Orfeas 2021’ based on a queer adaptation of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo.

Foivos Dousos has completed his PhD on narcissism in new media cultures and maintains a strong research interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis, literary avant-gardes of the 20th century and queer & feminist formally innovative writing. As a poet, he has published work both in Greek and in English – in 2019 one of his poems was included in the collective volume A Queer Anthology of Sickness by Pilot Press and he collaborated with poet D. Mortimer on the Pamphlet ‘We are the same number now’.

Fil Ieropoulos was born in Athens in 1978 and raised in northern greece. He studied media arts in the UK and in 2009 completed his PhD on poetics and film, under the supervision of Nicky Hamlyn and Judith Williamson. He has been working at Buckinghamshire New University since 2003 and his films, performances, artworks and writing have been shown in numerous festivals, conferences and showcases around Europe.