Dada Polis – Living Archive
It means something. It is a state of affect, a sparked mind, an emotional canvas. It is a social disruption of (re)presentation, perception, (re)cognition, meaning, self and other.
It is non-local and self-organizing, relational and pre-political. It comes from our previous curatorial concepts about art and life, human and non-human nature, space and commons, social imagination and political articulation… It comes as a sound, a light, a movement, an object, a counter-habitus and a hunger. It is not a place, but a temporary autonomous sphere where all is (im)possible for (un)certain moments of liberating social resistance. A sphere that overlaps self and alone, others and commons, moments of being-in-tune no matter where or with whom we are.
By introducing Dada Polis, the StockHolm edition of the Living Archive enters into an affective space of apocalyptic distortions of today’s world existence. It looks for post-apocalyptic emotions to disturb the (ideo)logical voices of the senseless present and turn on (en)visioning lights of a common(sense) future. Leaning on a pre-political assemblage that escapes the a materiality of possession, the exclusiveness of power-oriented rules and all kinds of social repressions, Dada Polis dissmisses the human rights and calls for reclaiming subjective responsibility as the only way towards regaining personal freedom. It does (not) count who is (not) there or who is (not) with us.
As an experimental space, and if we paraphrase Kathi Weeks, as “‘a matter of expressing feminist political desire immanent to existence’,” it is a spark of for possible living conditions and social circumstances of the Everyday beyond capitalism and patriarchy.
As a feminist rupture into the state of art, Dada Polis scratches the art-mirror of social reality, and its projection of bare truth goes beyond, to envision the (im)possible -– departing from the absurdity of existing lieity and turning to affects as a pre-condition of political articulation of the reality we are creating by thinking and living.
