“Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.” (Timothy Snyder)

Fake news and campaigns of disinformation are, historically speaking, not a new phenomenon. The artist John Heartfield (1891–1968) fought against misinformation, propaganda, militarism, war and fascism throughout his life. His political photomontages, published in Arbeiter – Illustrierte – Zeitung (A – I – Z), became icons in the fight against National Socialism. 

Because of digitalisation, however, technologies are now available to spread them even faster and more effectively than ever before. In the so-called post-factual age, the borders between truth and fake have become blurred, political strategies produce and use “alternative facts” and even deny scientific data and knowledge. Democracies all over the world are affected by these developments. Acts of truthtelling, whistleblowing and leaking information provide increasing resistance to regimes of contradiction, false information and wrongdoing. In the light of the global revival of the far-right and contested spaces of interpretation in society, the laboratory addresses digitality, post-truth and historiography as well as contemporary artistic strategies against misinformation and propaganda. How “truths” are deconstructed or revealed in fictional artistic contexts is investigated. The lab pursues an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach within each artistic or discursive contribution.

Given the Covid-19 crisis, this topic has gained new meaning: on the one hand, the pandemic has provoked conspiracy theories in alternative media; fake news is being circulated and “reality” is dissolving in isolation. On the other hand, management of the crisis has strengthened and legitimised the use of big data and digital surveillance of humans and bodies, their movements and virus loads. The state and laws of emergency are being abused to consolidate power and destroy the constitutional state. At the same time, the crisis is promoting racism and social mechanisms of discrimination and marginalisation and revealing social and global inequalities that affect marginalised groups within our societies in particular.

The Laboratory of Contested Space is part of the online educational programme accompanying the exhibition John Heartfield – Photography Plus Dynamite exhibition at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Originally planned as a public event at the Akademie at Pariser Platz, with staged readings, performances, artistic interventions and a panel, the Laboratory of Contested Space is taking place exclusively online. The participants will share impulse lectures and artistic contributions in the form of videos that have mainly been produced in quarantine. The recipients are invited to delve into the topic through political and artistic discourse, performances and personal narratives by the contributors. This format is a space for research and exchange with an open outcome.

With contributions by Tatiana Bazzichelli (artistic director, Disruption Network Lab Berlin), Göksu Kunak a.k.a. Gucci Chunk (writer, performance artist), Lynn Takeo Musiol (dramaturge, writer; fellow of der AdK), Luiza Prado (artist), Mykola Ridnyi (artist, fellow of der AdK), Cemile Sahin (artist, fellow of der AdK), Eva Tepest (writer, journalist), Christian Tschirner (head dramaturge, Schaubühne Berlin), Voin de Voin (artist).

The laboratory is curated by Lynn Takeo Musiol and the JUNGE AKADEMIE (Clara Herrmann / head of the department & Luise Pilz).

Featured by ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

The Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) supports the programme of events for the exhibition, in the context of which this digital offer was created.

This GIF essay — a hybrid animation and text format the artist has been developing since 2018 — navigates the repercussions and the human cost of the covid-19 crisis in Brazil through anticolonial and feminist lenses. The essay discusses the eugenic policies of the neofascist Bolsonaro regime, outlining its entanglements with the deployment of biopower as a fundamental aspect of coloniality. In a non-linear timeline, the work examines the temporal processes that collapse into the current situation, discussing the central role of white supremacy in the formation of contemporary nation states in Latin America; capitalist notions of productivity and the body traced back to chattel slavery of the the colonial economy; and the confluence of anticolonial futurities and pathogen resistance.

Reading list

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, 1st edition, 2004, Autonomedia.

Michelle Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience, 2012, Duke University Press Books.

The role of the artist has often been crucial in unveiling the construct around the concept of truth in times of repression and beyond. In the 1980s and 1990s, underground art networks such as Neoism and the Luther Blissett Project demonstrated that truth is a material that can be moulded, it depends on who is writing the dominant narrative. The multiple identity practices under the collective name Luther Blissett exposed the failures of media reporting and exploited poor fact-checking and a lack of source investigation by mainstream journalism. They created another level of information using fakes and pranks to show that the truth is always a construction. In the current post-truth scenarios, fakes and misinformation techniques are used by right wing propaganda outlets to create their own information agenda, delegitimising the work of mainstream media as they do so. However, their form of delegitimisation of power mechanisms is based on the production of chaos to build up another form of power, which is destructive in that it targets the vulnerable segments of society. Artists need to intervene in such feedback loop of disruption by producing literacy and awareness. In order to break this loop, artists analyse how information works and how the truth is produced. The key lies in the deconstruction of information as an artistic practice, tracing the sources, producing literacy and contributing to raising awareness by showing that information always delivers a specific, biased vision of reality. In this call to artistic action, the work of artists meets the work of whistleblowers, people who expose misconduct and wrongdoing by the powerful through acts of truthtelling. In the context of whistleblowing, truth is deconstructed as an investigation of sources, of hidden data and documents, to denounce abuses of power. In the art of whistleblowing, information becomes an occasion to reveal how power works, how it is constructed and what the systemic structures behind it are.

Reading list

Tatiana Bazzichelli, Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking, 2013, DARC PRESS – Aarhus University, Denmark.

Tatiana Bazzichelli, Networking. La rete come arte, 2006, Costa & Nolan; auf Englisch: Networking, The Net as Artwork, 2008, Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University.

Stewart Home, Florian Cramer, The House of Nine Squares. Letters on Neoism, Psychogeography and Epistemological Trepidation, 1997, Invisible Books.

Monty Cantsin (ed.), Neoism Now!, 1987, Artcore Editions.

Luther Blissett, Totò, Peppino e la guerra psichica. Materiali dal Luther Blissett Project, 1996, AAA Edizioni.

Göksu Kunak’s interest lies in queer methodologies (especially chronopolitics) and hybrid texts that deal with the performative lingo(s) of contemporary lifestyles. In a world where experts are doomed, our reality shifts at the speed of a thumb scrolling down. Awake! is a reflection on this fragmented speed; surveillance, truth and trust. In the text, excerpts from semi-fictional interviews on diversity in business culture with the AI robot Sophia and several advertisements for objects and actions that control the body greet us through the format and hybridity of a TV/radio show. In addition to this, suggestions from Jehovah’s Witness magazines focusing post-truth culture to guide us to God and reflections on body politics such as Orientalist imagery – for instance, the Odalisque image in the Western canon – or the pharmocopornographic (Preciado) era ponder various methods of power structures.

Lecture Script Awake

Reading list

Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, 2010, Duke University Press.

Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics, 2013 in English, The Feminist Press.

Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: The Fugitive Planning & Black Study, 2016, Minor Compositions.

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016, Duke University Press.

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 1961, in English 2001, Turko-Tatar Press.

Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, 2015, University of Minnesota Press.

“I may be very sick just a few days from now and I may have infected others. My body might have caught the coronavirus in the past, making my future and those around me uncertain.” (Iris van der Tuin)

The Covid-19 crisis confronts our society with a non-linear understanding of temporality and the need to consider individual freedom against the background of the safety of all. This individualisation of responsibility means that many are faced with the difficulty of transferring privileges that were considered a matter of course into an extensive network of solidarity. At the same time, this shift means a crisis for queer minorities in a double sense: If contact restrictions are measured according to the social standard of the traditional nuclear family, the solidarity practised for so long by alternative lifestyles will be eroded. In order to prevent this contradiction of a present without resistance, a truth without physical attachment, we advocate for queer ethics of intimate forbearance and political radicalism. In concrete terms, we look at exemplary artistic strategies from the ACT UP milieu.

Lecture (PDF)

Reading list

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2011, Duke University Press.

Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers, 2019, Penguin Books.

Iris Van der Tuin, “Past-Present-Future and the 2019-20 Coronavirus Pandemic,” Identities Journal, LOCKDOWN THEORY #14.

Eva and Lynn Takeo write prose, essays and criticism together for taz, Glitter, Dirty Debüt, metamorphosen and the Berliner Festspiele’s Theatertreffen-Blog. They are currently working on a novel

I grew up in the GDR, a society described by Czech dissident and later State President Václav Havel as post-totalitarian. In his essay on “living in truth” (The Power of the Powerless, 1978), a standard reference work for Eastern European dissidents, Havel not only examines the relationship between power and resistance in socialism as it actually existed but also puts forward the thesis that Eastern European societies were extreme versions of Western European consumer and industrial society. What is more: They expose the technical civilization of the capitalist West’s own latent, directional tendencies. With the election of Donald Trump and the rise of right-wing populists all over the world, Havel’s thesis has gained surprising significance. So my question is: What does a look back at my socialist youth tell us about our near future?

Lecture (PDF)

Reading list

Edward Luttwak, Why Fashism is the Wave of the Future, 1994, London Review of Books.

Myriam Revault d’Allonnes, Brüchige Wahrheit, 2019, Hamburger Editionen.

Video Kritische Theorie “Propaganda”.