Radio Show Me What Democracy Looks Like – Episode 12

This twelfth episode of Radio Show Me What Democracy Looks Like looks at participation, performance and pomp in democratic visual culture, Sanja Iveković’s Monument to Revolution (2017) and how to stop being ourselves.

Participation, Performance & Pomp in Democratic Visual Culture

Sanja Iveković Monument to Revolution (2017)

Soft Power of Exergue on documenta 14

Musical Outro: Alicia Keys Girl on Fire (2012)

  We’re supposed to be this big, and so tiny, and so skinny. If we have any hips or any thickness or width with us, we’re fat. We torture ourselves; we don’t eat. I’ve experienced all of that,” she says. “I was subscribing to this sick identity. … Stay in your place, be feminine, be a lady, don’t make too much noise.

• Alicia Keys

Footnote on how to stop being ourselves

The Hallmark card exercise in freedom, is be yourself, right? There’s no reality show in the US that does not tell you this little homespun message, be yourself. So I would say that one exercise in freedom is that we have to stop being ourselves, making such a project of being ourselves, spending every moment thinking about how to be ourselves. This investment in the individual, the individual’s traumas, the individual’s losses, the individual’s pain, the individual’s nightmares, is actually part of a neoliberal, disaggregation of parts from collectives that we would want to resist.And again, this would be a kind of counter use of the term trans to not use trans as a new place to find out about who someone really is, okay? Because that’s the actual narrative of transgender becoming. If you read the autobiography, I was born into one body, but I was really another body. And that transformation makes us feel comfortable that there really is a body to become when what we want to do maybe is stall that becoming and not become ourselves.

• Jack Halberstam