DEMOCRACIA
2014-10-13Globalization brings with it a feeling of mistrust, rejection and powerlessness towards the mechanisms of government and political power. This turns into a crisis that alters our perception of events such as social conflicts, economic crises, wars, violence, catastrophes, etc. In the face of this scenario, a group of intellectuals, artists, activists and citizens are backing a form of commitment which makes different kinds of abuse in society a central theme and which counteracts them with oppositional and imaginative social models. Often, against the cynicism that dominates global capitalism, they not only establish an attitude of protest and opposition but also generate growing interest in building a new collective action space within existing social structures, combining ideology and imagination, in order to express a will that is anti-system, anti-capitalist and anti-state through actions that try both to make visible and to undermine power.
Within this context, DEMOCRACIA explores different power structures and the status of the spectator through its work and through its public interventions in the cultural, urban and socio-political space of democratic societies. Performances which provoke subversive and critical situations that take place in the context of the city understood as a space of conflict. Political and social reflection is a constant element in DEMOCRACIA’s work, commandeering aspects of consumer culture – archetypes of mass culture – and strong theoretical foundations in which they refer to philosophers, thinkers and activists as a basis of a narrative that seeks to re-define aspects of the public urban space.
In We protect you from yourselves, DEMOCRACIA encourages the spectator to reflect on the tension and action characteristic of their practices – practices which are positioned as a crisis of contemporary contradictions between the subject and the historical context.
Exhibition runs through to November 11th, 2014
ADN Galeria
c/ Enrique Granados, 49
SP-08008 Barcelona
Spain
