Fragile Safety
(Public Performance) in collaboration with Susu Shuling Shih (Taiwan) in the frame of the Artist-in-Residency “Art Commune” organized by the ACSL (Art and Cultural Studies Laboratory), Yerevan, Armenia.
Sharles Aznavour square, December, 2008, Yerevan Armenia.
Invited artists: Guillaume Aubry (France), Ulrika Ferm (Finland), Nazeli Hakobyan (Armenia), Stas Shulepov (Armenia) were involved in the project.
In the Ancient Greece the ‘pracsis’ and the ‘theory’ were clearly divided. According to Plato the jump from one to another was a мetanoya, a way which people had to pass to go out of cave and to achieve a godlike view upon the world. Contemporary мetanoya is based on the opposite: contemporary individual forms images of the world by means of mass media; it’s a same like view upon the world.
Today we are the eyewitness of society’s growing visualization, the spreading of various image technologies, the grasp of presentation modes, and the globalization definitely is a perspective inspired by global media. It means, that not only the perception of present facts, but also our view towards the history is mediated by image technologies and by certain strategies of presentation.
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The idea of the project is about how Government uses the media as a tool to control and lead the people. The project is connected to the mode how an individual relates to the reality.
Government uses words such as Freedom, Democracy, Liberty, Hope Prosperity as ‘the better life’ for people as it knows these are the “things” that people want. These words as a trick to let people to have illusion to believe that they will be taken to there where they want to be.
Government gives you a false dream, a false hope to believe there is a better place than here to create an illusion for the people so you can hold on that false dream carry on in life.
In Taiwan people read and heard through all the media to believe they can be better off by join China they can gain more prosperity and fulfill bigger dream, we are fed with false dreams until we are choked. The ‘modus operandi’ of the individuals in modern Armenia the action of which isn’t rationally choused by the person to influence external objects or other people’s behavior, where he looks for his own benefits, not speaking about his beliefs.
It is important to connect this quick view of processes with the beginning of great social, civil movement in Armenia during past several months and the fact of coherent actions of Armenia’s new rulers to behead this movement.
It wasn’t a nation-wide movement; it was a social and civic movement, as it was a struggle between two parts of society on one hand, and a struggle for democratic values on the other hand.
The most part of Armenian people didn’t take part in this demonstration of activism. A paradoxical explanation given by lots was that living in too bad social conditions they couldn’t leave their everyday tasks of survival. Mass Medias don’t tie the ideology of the movement with the social and civic consciousness. They view it as an organized fight to satisfy one person’s political ambitions.
S. Gyulamiryan
www.acsl.org.am
