Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Philosophers such as Christian Salmon—a member of the Centre for Research On Art And Language—have described and analysed a contemporary phenomenon which goes beyond, and is different from media manipulation and censorship as defined since the first decades of the 20th Century: storytelling, or the machine to fabricate stories. A system to impose ideas, generate sense and control the behaviour born in the US. Art hasn't been, and isn't unrelated to the narrative operations of storytelling. In a deliberate ambiguity, it both denounces the excess of publicity or propaganda marketing, and deploys similar formulae in its production of meaning. "We all need our own story. This is the vulnerability that storytelling bases its strategy on." And, by force of its strength, it also builds itself an imaginary.

The section borrows its title from the sixth poetry book by Antonio Gamoneda, dated between 1975 and 1976, Descripción de la mentira (Description of the Lie). A decrying, and a warning, of the deceit and fraud through which representation (or its more common formulation, the word) weaves the real of the reality it covers up. The lie as will and as a tool for the representation of the world, extended like oil and multiplied by the media of reality constitution of the truth of all there is.

This reality has become more and more evident, both in the resources used in Communist political systems, which have almost vanished in Europe with the turn of the century, and in the multiplicity of false narratives constructed in order to endorse the Iraq War, or, more recently, in the inflation of economic stories which take over the informational horizon and, at the same time, dilute realities and responsibilities. The eruption of pieces of information provided by WikiLeaks has not only made evident the known facts of double standards, covert operations, protection of certain crimes, and other similar miseries of the relationship between the powerful and their more or less legitimate representatives. It has also established, more or less clearly, the nature of the rules of conspiracy for the elaboration of the deceitful stories spread through public opinion, and, also although collaterally, how communication media are, really, filtering systems for the information to be disseminated, hidden, and, above all, the information that certain interests want to skew.

German artist Wolfgang Tillmans simulates contemporary encyclopaedic knowledge in a series of works that reproduce the information reproduced in print media on diverse issues under the common umbrella of "the truth.” The works Argentinian-Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija allude to the capacity of modification and propaganda content of the news published in print media, however different the topics covered, be it the War in Lebanon or the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Spanish artist Dora García penetrates the offices of the sinister Stasi, the ideological police of the German Democratic Republic, which has become a society within society, with its own internal rules. Danish artist Lene Berg, in turn, deconstructs the happy image of a free and educated society, revealing how many of the actions we consider intellectual nevertheless respond to plans laid out by the powers that be in order to ensure their supremacy. Finally, Argentinian artist Judi Werthein explores the anomalous construction of identities in the Renacer Colony, founded in Chile's Araucana by Germans connected to National Socialism, who fled the German war defeat.

The final leg of the decade of the 1980s was an involved witness of how the spectre that had haunted it since 1848, with the publication of the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, and had been a solid and dominant figure in the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe and part of Asia after the end of World War II and the Korean War, would vanish from the Russian and Western horizons—except for the shadow of some lonely spectre—and would only continue to howl in some parts of the Far East, where it has either entrenched in famine and horror, or where, on the contrary, it has experimented with one of its most extraordinary and contradictory transformations: that mix of political Communism and economic Capitalism that characterise China.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Union, the Reunification of Germany, and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, with the subsequent progressive inclusion of some of its countries to the European Union, not only accounted for first-class geostrategic and economic changes, whose consequences are still being paid by the citizens of these countries, and those of Western countries in general, but which also involved ideological and programmatic changes of extraordinary depth, the final structure of which has been definitely consolidated, while simultaneously positioned in its appropriate perverse and damaging perspective by the ferocious crisis triggered, only two decades later, in the very sustainability of the Capitalist system and its single thought discourse.

The political situation derived from these events has experienced different narratives, according to circumstances, vantage points and distance from the extinct USSR. Currently, some democracies, almost comparable to the de facto pre-existing ones, combine this with authentic autocracies, countries submerged in criminal structures, and other that could hardly be considered autonomous entities. But both remain equally silent in terms of autonomous political thought.

The Russian collective Chto Delat? (Nikolay Oleynikov), with its Leninist historical resonance, makes the viewer critically engage the events during the presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev and the beginning of the 90's that lead to the demise of the Soviet system. The video of Ciprian Muresan shows a false silent story with which he convinces us of something as impossible to believe as is the statement that Communism, in fact, never existed, allowing a double reading of that very sentence. Finally, Manolo Quejido explores his personal feelings regarding Cuba, in a manner in which the clarity of thought regarding the current situation doesn't preclude his empathy with Cuban citizens, the recognition of their dignity and the Revolution they encouraged and in the circumstances in which they live.

The economic crisis triggered between 2007 and 2008 caught the governments and a good number of economic analysts unaware, as if it were a case of a strange, illogical, unforeseeable fact, independent from the economic policies adopted during the past three decades. "The crisis is interpreted not as the inevitable result of the instability of the unregulated financial markets themselves, but as the effect of the lack of honesty and the irresponsibility of a few financial agents out of the control of public powers,” as is pointed out in the book Manifesto of Terrified Economists. Many voices are raised against these policies, that underscore the urgent need to reset economic thought, and powerful social movements are born that demand a kind of sustainable development, not premised on consumerism, waste and the depletion of the planet's resources.

Nevertheless, in order to amend this crisis, those responsible for triggering it are called upon, as indicated by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, "(...) looking for its solution in the very ideas and behaviors that fostered it." A new terminology is being put in place, and concepts such as "to calm the markets,” the translation of which is no other but the reduction of gains for the workers, their precariousness and the general retreat in their social benefits, measures that, paradoxically, don't seem to help in alleviating the situation. "Much as you downsize, you won't wake up with a job,” stated a sticker worn by participants in the demonstrations that took place in Madrid in autumn 2010 against the plans for economic cuts on workers.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, an artist engaged in weaving socialisation connections opposed to those imposed by Capitalism, based on unbridled consumerism—what Ulrich Beck summarises in the concept of "organised irresponsibility"—with Fear Eats Away At The Soul, a series of canvases where he continues with the set of ideas already postulated in The Days Of This Society Are Numbered, uses news articles published in German newspapers between September and October 2008 that reflect on the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, a decisive fact in the triggering of the current economic crisis. In the meantime, Daniel García Andújar, in Time Line, brings together a wide range of images from media and advertising in order to configure a subjective chronology where different events from the post-Capitalist period are narrated.

From a different vantage point, in The Financial Crisis, the Superflex collective parodies this situation with humor. Through a fictional narrative, it describes the situation as if it were an illness that could be cured through hypnosis, a healing that, finally, will only be possible if we leave the establishment. Also through fiction, Jan Peter Hammer, with his piece The Anarchist Banker, explores, in a narrative plot that follows the structure of a TV interview, the ultra-liberal positions of the financial workers that turns individualism into the foundation of human behaviour. Andrés Rábago, hidden behind his pseudonym El Roto, offers a clear answer to this question with his cartoons and his telegraph-like comments, which mix irony, dark humor and sarcasm, in order to compose a stark portrait of our present. From a different point of view, Katya Sander seeks to engage the spectator, involving them along with the characters that burst onto the screen, in order to answer, over and over again, the same question: "What is Capitalism?”

The tide of popular rebellions that have spread throughout the Maghreb and the Middle East since the Winter of 2011 caught the West so off guard that they have plunged it into the greatest confusion. First Tunisia, and then Egypt saw how the peaceful popular pressure, headed by the youth, brought down the governments of Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak. The riots in Morocco, Algeria, Bahrain, Yemen, and Oman take place with different degrees of intensity, and, in all cases, are violently repressed. In the first days of March 2011, Libya was the scenario where repression adopted its most unbridled brutality. In the meantime, the paralysis affects the democracy of the developed countries who are witnessing these projects by turning a blind eye, and appear surprised that their own good allies, suppliers of raw materials and great business, could be so tyrannical with their own people.

How are we to understand this confusion and this extreme slowness in reacting on behalf of Western democracies? It is obvious that the weight of economic interests is key. But, intertwined with these interests, we have the ignorance and prejudices that identify the Arabic world with radical Islam, the lines of thought according to which, in those contexts, the weight of religion makes it impossible for them to develop democratic forms of coexistence. All these attitudes are permeated by a set of prejudices that perpetuate the shadow of the colonial heritage, as well as the belief that the rights, freedoms and welfare of societies can only come from the experience of the West. In opposition to this exclusionary and totalizing nature of modern rationality, we have the statements of Walter Mignolo, when he refers to the fact that "unfinished project of Modernity,” can only be realised when the "unfinished project of decoloniality" has taken place, understanding the idea of coloniality as the "cultural logic" of colonialism and its heritage; a heritage which survives, and multiplies, even when the domination of colonial power has disappeared.

The goal is to focus the spotlight on certain realities that shape the recent; to map, describe, analyse, expose power configurations, decode, deconstruct, re-read, discover what lies behind the inherited images, behind History as it is being narrated, and to explore the geopolitical reconfigurations generated by the new relationships of global domination. It is a case, finally, of "opening up the code the visual frame, showing its reverse, exhibiting its entrails,” as pointed out by García Andújar. Some of these questions feed the work of Fernando Bryce, who engages representations of colonial practices and their "civilising" discourses. Through a collection of posters, Lebanese artist Zeina Maastri, researches the different narratives between text, image and transmission of discourse among the groups’ participating in the civil war in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. Meanwhile, Ignasi Aballí traces a cartography of international conflicts through the cold operation of accounting their media presence, and Zhou Xiaohu produces a critical discourse on media and their capacity of manipulation and concealment. On the other hand, Federico Guzmán points out how the consequences of the FTAs, a new form of global coloniality, affect the everyday practice of citizens.

While broad movements arise that demand access to political systems based on rights and freedoms which they have been refused for decades, the signs of decline in these conquests are obvious. "Democracy - the formal and substantive, representative and participatory, procedural and material - is not currently going through its finest hour,” states Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, who points out how "After September the 11th 2001, there has been a shift (...) which tends to give democracies a huge discretion to downsize freedoms and apply enforcement policies." The excuse of terrorism is effectively exploited by the US while developed Europe wields immigration in its "defensive" strategy, strengthening its frontiers and cutting minority rights within, all that with the agreement, in both cases, of large sectors of the population.

In the face of these dynamics, there are other voices that question the democratic model premised on highly structured traditional political parties, and their alternation in government and in voting as a simple act of citizen participation. Technological development allows a global-scale control which was unimaginable only a few decades ago, but which, once an almost absolute surveillance and control have been made possible, where the notion of privacy has been eroded, has opened up the doors to a new phase in terms of information transmission, communication and unmediated relationship among individuals, which is revealed, in an extraordinary manner, in the deployment of new forms of organisation.

Ed Hall, with his banners, builds a kind of micro-history of social struggles of the recent decades in England; and Artur Zmijewski, in his work Democracies, shows concentrations of people in different parts of the world (Belfast, Berlin, the West Bank, Gaza, Warsaw, Strasbourg) collected both in anti-war protests or repression, as playful and celebratory events, where the human body becomes the centre of attention. Sometimes it is simply a case of compelling and collecting the voices of citizens, as does Carlos Motta in his analysis of what is democracy and what it means today, a research project that has lasted for four years and which is titled The good life. His inquiry is not far from the one raised by Oliver Ressler, determined to note that there are other ways of understanding, of deepening, of extending what we understand as democratic systems. In What is Democracy? Ressler interviews philosophers, politicians, activists and concerned citizens in order to delineate other forms of economic and political intervention, of individual and collective development. In one of these interviews, German sociologist Heinz Dieterich points out that "The objective conditions are much more prone to a truly participatory democracy. I think there has never been a better chance of having a truly direct democracy that the one we have today."