Radio Show Me What Democracy Looks Like – Episode 9

In this ninth episode of Radio Show Me What Democracy Looks Like, we circle back to earlier themes in the visual culture of democracy (architecture, ‘The People’ vs people, memory, otherness, and violence), the juxtaposition of ruins and life in Andreas Angelidakis’ Demos (2016-ongoing), and things that have spirits.

Ruins and Life in Democratic Visual Culture

Andreas Angelidakis Demos (2016-ongoing)

[S]oft foam blocks served as infinitely reconfigurable modular seating for a gathering. The form represents, perhaps, a queer alternative to a culture of excess, a more inclusive counterpoint to the marble steps of the Pnyx in ancient Athens. First devised for Documenta 14, Angelidakis’s “Demos” series, 2016–, has quickly evolved into his signature body of work, the blocks’ surfaces altered for each iteration: faux pink marble for the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; ancient and folkloric designs from handmade rugs for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto; political slogans for the KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes in Bergen, Norway. In Angelidakis’s neo-animist worldview, buildings represent emotional forms that reflect reality in the most brutal way —a landscape one recognizes in the streets surrounding the gallery, where the textual chaos of graffiti has transformed a sea of architectural mediocrity into a collective howl of existential anguish.

• Klea Charitou

Athens 2016-2017

Warsaw 2018

Moscow 2018

Toronto 2018-2019

Bergen 2019

Brisbane 2020

Exercises of Freedom in Exergue on documenta 14

Musical Outro: Tame Impala Let it Happen

I think most of that song was put together at different times, when I was on tour, actually. I remember it came to me, I think I was walking to my hotel room in Oklahoma. And then the chorus, I was at a festival in Hungary or Turkey. And then the midsection, the jam bit, I was on a train. That’s a bit looping and a weird repetitive thing going on, and I had my laptop on a train in France, going to Toulouse. I think with that song, one thing led to another. I was just jamming by myself in the way I do, and I put it on a loop to see what sounds cool. I just see where it takes me^. 

• Kevin Parker

Footnote on things that have spirits

So during the ban [1885-1951], as an exercise of freedom, potlatches went underground where their outward character was disguised, and at times goods were given at Christmas as presents, while in the 1930s communities began hosting deliberately disjointed ceremonies. So dances and speeches would take place at a different time, so not at the same time. So gift giving was banned, which meant that if you gave gifts without the context of the dances and the ceremonies, maybe they were just simply gifts in the eyes of others. […] The potlatch, despite the repeated dictate and assumption that it would die out and its subsequent renunciation by Native peoples under duress, adopted new forms, and indeed it carried on. One of the first people to try to get back some of the regalia and the objects understood not simply as objects or simply as mass, but indeed as beings, things that are animate, things that have spirits, was Chief James Sewid. In 1967, after initial conversations failed, he tried to buy them back for the same price that they were originally sold to for two museums. But the museum said no because indeed they wanted to charge him for the cost that they had undertaken while these objects were in their care. So it wasn’t the original purchase price, but something else.

• Candice Hopkins