We live in times of crisis.
The globalized world, especially as it was formed after 9/11, is beset
today, more than ever, by economic, political, religious, ethnic and social
crises, but also by a deep existential identity crisis.
The 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, once the fourth largest
investment bank in the United States, was a clear sign that “something is
rotten in the State of Denmark”1and set fire to the lurking financial crisis
worldwide. A crisis spreading in
a chain reaction – possibly the most complex one since the Second World
War and quite different from the 1929 stock market crash – the consequences of
which are still felt today, especially within the European territory.
A crisis creates uncertainty and panic, a redeployment of correlations
and forces, and it often leads to a redefinition of ideologies. The rulers and
those in power see their force weaken, unable to react to the torrent of rapid
changes, while the weak – that is, the masses – watching their standard of living
plummet below the limits of human dignity, often resort to activism, and
sometimes even to violent acts.
Between 2009 and now, we have witnessed a series of unprecedented riots
taking place in various areas around the world. The rapid spread of the social
networking media, which to a large extent have substituted conventional media
and the
“television wars” of previous decades, have had a significant contribution
to shaping these collective reactions.
Half a century after the student riots in the United States and Europe
(in the early 1960s), the angry young indignados in Madrid’s Puerta Del Sol
claim their lost future, having inspired through their mass mobilisation the
indignant Greeks at Syntagma Square in Athens, Greece, a country where strict austerity
measures are crashing the middle and working classes, bringing salaries and
benefits down to the levels of the 1970s.
In Great Britain, Canada, Finland, Denmark and elsewhere, the main
objective of police kettling – a tactic for controlling crowds during
demonstrations or protests by containing them within a limited area – is the
weakening of any kind of reaction.
In August 2011, London and several other cities in England experienced
devastating and revelatory demonstrations of anger, hopelessness, despair and
revenge, all of which signal the beginning of the establishment of a
contemporary “urban jungle”.
According to Paul Mason, “we are in the middle of a revolution caused by
the near collapse of free-market capitalism combined with an upswing in
technical innovation, a surge in desire for individual freedom and a change in
human consciousness about what freedom means.”
A strange foreign body appears to have been stuck on the south side of
the Municipal Arts Centre. Quite high up, like another appendage, it seems to
protrude vertically from the wall like a huge nest of a mechanical bird. On a
closer look we
realise that this is an iron trailer with the insignia of the United Nations.
It is in fact an old mobile telecommunications station of the UN forces in
Cyprus. Passing directly underneath, the viewer sees a sequence of numbers
projected on the sidewalk.
Looking up, there is a lit surface, shiny as a mirror, which is the
‘floor’ of the construction, engraved with the sequence of numbers projected on
the sidewalk.
The artists Nikos Kouroussis
and Constantinos Kalisperas have
carved on this surface all the resolutions of the Security Council of the
United Nations on Cyprus. In direct dialogue with the Stairs of Innocent of
Pravdoliub Ivanov, the work deals with the concepts of security, monitoring,
communication and protection. As it is attached to the wall of the Municipal
Art Centre’s library, this huge construction, incapable of action, transforms
into a contemporary monument of “collapsed endeavours”.
*Curator/Text: Yiannis Toumazis
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