ARCO 07. Todos Sois Culpables Salvo Yo. Un proyecto de Democracia.

Todos Sois Culpables Salvo Yo / All of you are guilty but I.
Proyecto de memorial al terrorista suicida.
Arco 07/ Galería Salvador Díaz.

Reflexionando a partir de este proyecto para dedicar un memorial al terrorista suicida, icono central de la sociedad del miedo contemporánea, John Peter Nilsson comisario del Moderna Museet de Estocolmo y Daniel Villegas han elaborado los siguientes textos:
All of you are guilty but I. By John Peter Nilsson
In the remarkable movie «Paradise now» (2005), co-written and directed by the Dutch-Palestinian Hany Abu-Assad, we follow two Palestinians everyday life in the closed Gazastrip. To begin with they seem to be totally unpolitical and not especially religious. But in the next 36 hours, the two childhood friends may do the unthinkable. Without any hopes for the future and feeling entrapped by the Israelian military, they are being recruited to commit a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.
What is interesting in the film is its «everydayness». The friends decision to die doesn‚Äôt come from an ecstatic belief to change the political life in the Middle East. Neither from a wish to become a marture. The decision is rather pragmatic and comes from boredom. Nothing will change in the area, they are for ever doomed to live their poor lifes, humiliated by the Israelien rulers. So of two bad choices they choose the least bad: Maybe there is a paradise after all ‚Äì and why not try for it now.
It is an extremly pessimistic film. It explains terrorism in a partly, at least for me, new way ‚Äì terror as a private escape from hell. I condemn terror in all forms, especially when innocent civilians die. But it is a rather complex discussion ‚Äì one can assert that killing a few can save many. But this is another discussion…
The new sculpture by Democracia has monumental proportions: 3,30 metres high. But it also is a monument. A man is sitting on a chair that stands on a pedestal in granite. There is also an inscription: «All you are guilty, except me.» It could be a famous writer sitting there. Or a political leader, a philosopher? But when one look closer from the front the man opens up his jacket a bit. Around his belly there are bombs. He is a suicide bomber.

As usual when confronted with Democracia’s work (earlier also El Perro’s) one feel provoked. Is this a celebration of terrorism directed against civilians? But of course it much more intricate. One one hand the sculpture discusses the concept of memorials. What is behind the immortalization of the many men (unfourtently it is sadly often men) that deserve to be remebered for ever? History changes. We know the polarization in the former Soviet Union after the fall of the wall between those that wanted to keep the Lenin’s and the Stalin’s or not. How many dead bodies, literally and symbolically speaking, are hidden before a monument is built? Democracia’s sculpture is deconstructing the phenomena of historical monuments.

But on the other hand the sculpture is also dealing directly with generalized victimization in the today‚Äôs society. «All you are guilty, except me» is what the suicide bomber is remembered for. The inscription, and also that the suicide bomber is sitting on an elevated pedestal, give the work a surprising perspective. It‚Äôs not the perspective of the victimized but rather of the perpetrator. I am reminded of the19th century writer Thomas de Quincey who said that an artwork about a murder is not a story about murder but murder itself. When looking at a murder scene, the perspective cannot be that of the victim but of the murderer ‚Äì or the viewer. If one really succeeded in assuming the victim‚Äôs point of view, the fear would be so overwhelming that an aesthetic experience would not be possible.
Yes, we are guilty by looking away of fear. By only suicide bombings as pure violence and not taking the political or relgious messages for real in order to start dialouges, we might create a society in which we feel like prisoners, not unlike the society in the above mentioned «Paradise now». Boredom ann pessimism may occur, and terrorism become the next jackass challenge?

El recurso del dolor. Por Daniel Villegas
Narra Naguib Mahfuz, en su trilogía sobre El Cairo, que aquellas personas que se veían abocadas a una situación de indigencia solían recurrir a los servicios de un personaje cuyo oficio consistía en producir daños corporales irreversibles, pero no mortales, con el objeto de convertir a estos clientes en tullidos que pudieran ejercer de un modo más eficaz la mendicidad. En este sentido, es ya clásico, el fenómeno de explotación del estatuto de víctima, entre aquel colectivo que no poseía otras posibilidades para su supervivencia.
Resulta, no obstante, sorprendente que la extensión de este fenómeno, el de la victimización, se muestre con un carácter generalizado en el mundo contemporáneo. En nuestro contexto más cercano «debido a una sorprendente inversión, los afortunados y los poderosos también quieren pertenecer a la aristocracia de la marginalidad», es decir, de las víctimas, tal y como sostiene Pascal Bruckner. Así, tal y como afirma Bruckner, el estado de victimización generalizado obedece a las condiciones de un contexto social donde el dolor y las víctimas del mismo han sido sacralizados debido a un proceso de infantilización del mundo y de irresponsabilidad subjetiva ante los avatares vitales. Este mecanismo, de carácter psicopatológico en sus versiones más obsesivas, «(…) permite desplegar sobre los seres más cercanos una tenaz voluntad de poder (…) La más mínima adversidad se engrandece entonces hasta alcanzar el tamaño de un acontecimiento mayor; se convierte en un bastión donde uno se encastilla para dar lecciones a los demás, mientras uno mismo se zafa de las críticas (…), pretenderse perseguido se convierte en una manera sutil de perseguir a los demás».
Tal es el prestigio que en las sociedades contemporáneas ostentan las víctimas, reales o simuladas, que ha devenido en un estatuto envidiable y deseable para una pléyade de simuladores para quienes «ser una víctima se convertirá en una vocación, en un trabajo a jornada completa».
En este estado de cosas, tal y como señala Bruckner se crea un clima basado en relaciones de desconfianza mutua, donde siempre existe la certeza de que alguien está conspirando contra nosotros. Esta atmósfera de sospecha generalizada produce un repliegue, una bunquerización, que no permite la definición del más mínimo proyecto colectivo. El fenómeno de suspicacia, hacia todos y hacia todo, ha sido definido por Peter Sloterdijk como atmoterrorismo; una vez realizados los diferentes ajustes de cuentas con las instancias legitimadoras del saber-poder moderno, por parte de quienes se han alzado como sus víctimas, habremos de transitar en un ambiente enrarecido.
En cualquier caso, de la situación de victimización generalizada se puede inferir el problema, más preocupante si cabe que lo hasta ahora apuntado, de la apropiación y/o suplantación, por parte de las víctimas simuladas, de la voz de las verdaderas víctimas. De este modo estamos ya acostumbrados a la manipulación del dolor del otro por parte de aquellos que pretenden, simulan, ser objeto de esta misma condición. Es habitual que aquel que puede erigirse como portavoz de las calamidades de determinados sujetos o colectivos, pese a no haber estado expuesto a las condiciones que convierten a aquellos en víctimas, se sitúe en primer término del proceso de victimización. Una instrumentalización ésta que permite la obtención de grandes dividendos. En el ámbito cultural en general, y del arte contemporáneo en particular, y muy especialmente en aquellos artistas y eventos que emplean como material de trabajo las problemáticas político-sociales podemos encontrar múltiples ejemplos de la explotación de la victimización. George Yúdice analiza en este sentido la explotación de aquellas manifestaciones culturales propias de colectivos víctimas de la desigualdad, o situaciones de problemática social. Yúdice trata en esta clave el proyecto fronterizo inSITE, y especialmente dentro de este, y de gran interés en lo relativo a la explotación irresponsable de las víctimas, el trabajo de Krzysztof Wodiczko sobre las maquiladoras de Tijuana.
Sea como simulacro o como explotación del estatuto de víctima y de los procesos de victimización, parece indudable la extraordinaria importancia que dichos fenómenos ostentan en la articulación de nuestras sociedades contemporáneas. El dolor, tal y como sostiene Yúdice en referencia a la cultura, se ha convertido en uno de los principales recursos de nuestra voluntad de poder.

Por último traemos aquí un articulo de Terry Eagleton sobre la figura de los terroristas suicidas, que son emparentados con los que hacen huelga de hambre:
A different way of death. By Terry Eagleton
While insurgents have been blowing themselves apart in Israel and Iraq, a silence has prevailed about what suicide bombing actually involves. Like hunger strikers, suicide bombers are not necessarily in love with death. They kill themselves because they can see no other way of attaining justice; and the fact that they have to do so is part of the injustice. It is possible to act in a way that makes your death inevitable without actually desiring it. Those who leapt from the World Trade Centre to avoid being incinerated were not seeking death, even though there was no way they could have avoided it.
Ordinary, non-political suicides are those whose lives have come to feel worthless to them, and who accordingly need a quick way out. Martyrs are more or less the opposite. People like Rosa Luxemburg or Steve Biko give up what they see as precious (their lives) for an even more valuable cause. They die not because they see death as desirable in itself, but in the name of a more abundant life all round.
Suicide bombers also die in the name of a better life for others; it is just that, unlike martyrs, they take others with them in the process. The martyr bets his life on a future of justice and freedom; the suicide bomber bets your life on it. But both believe that a life is only worth living if it contains something worth dying for. On this theory, what makes existence meaningful is what you are prepared to relinquish it for. This used to be known as God; in modern times it is mostly known as the nation. For Islamic radicals it is both inseparably.
Blowing yourself up for political reasons is a complex symbolic act, one that mixes despair and defiance. It proclaims that even death is preferable to your wretched way of life. The act of self-dispossession writes dramatically large the self-dispossession that is your routine existence. Laying violent hands on yourself is a more graphic image of what your enemy does to you anyway. At the same time, the bomber forces a contrast between the extreme kind of self-determination involved in taking his own life and the lack of such self-determination in his everyday existence. If he could live in the way he dies, he would not need to die. At least his death can be his death, and thus a taste of freedom. The only form of sovereignty left to you is the power to dispose of your own death. Suicide, as Dostoevsky recognised, means the death of God, since you usurp his divine monopoly over life and death. What more breathtaking form of omnipotence than to do away with yourself for all eternity?
Suicide bombers and hunger strikers are out to transform weakness into power. Because they are ready to die while their enemies are not, they score a spiritual victory over them. The ultimate freedom is not to fear death. If you no longer fear it, political power can have no hold over you. Those with nothing to lose are deeply dangerous. But suicide bombers also cheat their antagonists of the only aspect of themselves that they can control: their bodies. By depriving their masters of this manipulable part of themselves, they become invulnerable. Nothing is less masterable than nothing. By slipping through the fingers of power, leaving it grasping at thin air, they force it to betray its own vacuousness. It is, to be sure, a pyrrhic victory. But it proclaims that what your adversary cannot annihilate is the will to annihilation. Like the traditional tragic hero, the suicide bomber rises above his own destruction by the very resolution with which he embraces it.
Blowing himself to pieces in a packed marketplace is likely to prove by far the most historic event of the bomber’s life. Nothing in his life, to quote Macbeth, becomes him like the leaving of it. This is both his triumph and his defeat. However miserable or impoverished, most men and women have one formidable power at their disposal: the power to die as devastatingly as possible. And not only devastatingly, but surreally. There is a smack of avant garde theatre about this horrific act. In a social order that seems progressively more depthless, transparent, rationalised and instantly communicable, the brutal slaughter of the innocent, like some Dadaist happening, warps the mind as well as the body. It is an assault on meaning as well as on the flesh – an ultimate act of defamiliarisation, which transforms the everyday into the monstrously unrecognisable.