Cap. III

Politics of the Present

Two characters of a story. A young couple placed within a landscape that offers no specific landmarks, a place that could be here or there. It could be their familiar setting that they call home or it could be the other, the strange, the unknown. The action continues. It is at sunset and the weight of the end overwhelms the two. They seem exhausted, but not by the labour that have passed. History is not the one that has to be carried on their shoulders. Tomorrow is the great enemy. The idea of the future is the one that brings fear of the uncertain into the eyes of the couple. They are not overwhelmed by debt but by the idea of paying the debt, knowing that they are now obliged to work. What if they get ill? What if they get fired and lose their source of income? What it will happen with their lives?

There is no time to live the present when tomorrow brings nothing but uncertainty. There is no time to change the future because the time of tomorrow has been already sold.

There is no present. The action of the story was written years ago. Nonetheless we continue to live by its words. We trust its timeline and live together with the two characters and their drama of living into a complex multi-layered society. Although cruel, the bi-dimensional screen, the film, the story, offers comfort. Humans are organic machines and the complexity of life is impossible to grasp. At least not by their hands, eyes and minds. People are limited by their life experience and there is no time to experience the totality of life on Earth. Mortality is just one of the problems, but through administrative technics, one can facilitate the classification and translation of life.

“Ideological products produce new stratifications of reality; they are the intersection where human power, knowledge, and action meet. New modes of seeing and knowing demand new technologies, and new technologies demand new forms of seeing and knowing.” (Maurizio Lazzarato, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Pag-144, University of Minnesota Press, 1996)

Politics has the capacity of organizing the unknowns of the future, but more than that, it has the capacity to build a present, to put things in order and prepare them for the future. Politics has the potentiality of composing a collective body in situations when the real connection of people is impossible. Politics is a tool of translation, classification and composition of the human will, knowledge and potentiality. Politics can be a prosthesis for the wellbeing of everyone and everything. Unfortunately, after years of failures in the face of private interests, politics has become just a mediator of the global exploitation of both humans and natural resources.

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11th of September
Chapter. IV (The End)

15th of September
Afterword

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Silvia Amancei (b.1991) and Bogdan Armanu (b.1991) is an artist couple living and working in the city of Iasi, Romania. They graduated BA (2013) and MA (2015) studies at “George Enescu” University of Arts (Faculty of Visual Art and Design) in Iasi. Collaborating since 2012, their artistic practice could be positioned at the border of social studies and visual art, having as a main research interest the potentiality of art and artistic means to overexcite the ability to look beyond capitalism and create a (common) future.