WORK / LIVE 干活 Beijing, Paris-Gonesse

The Social Sensibility R&D Departments of the Bernard Controls factories in Beijing and Paris-Gonesse were invited to co-curate, with Mike Watson, Quartair and Artists at Risk, a section of Politics of Dissonance, an official collateral event of Manifesta 12 devoted to performance, sound art, spoken word and VJing, in a space in Vicolo del Pallone, in the Kalsa district of Palermo. Our proposal, Karaoke Propaganda, was a group action that flowed through a whole day, on 8 July 2018.

In the morning we put up posters of the event around the neighbourhood, along the harbour and in the narrow streets, on public and private walls, talking with local shopkeepers and passers-by. On the seafront we practised water calligraphy with brooms and buckets, as in Chinese public parks; we played games in the public gardens and, back at the venue, covered the walls with large characters in Chinese, French, English and Italian until sunset. Then came the VJ set, live music by Fenni, karaoke and open-mic sessions until late into the night.

The project grew out of eight years of collecting people’s voices in the Beijing factory and four in Paris-Gonesse – through interviews, conversations, wall writing, digital exchanges and written documents. Working with people of different countries, cultures and backgrounds, we used art as a tool and a language to let them explore what they wished and to open a different dialogue with themselves and others, inside and outside work. Giving voice to people in a real situation means bringing up the contradictions, differences and limits that human relationships face every day; peer pressure and cultural identity often prove harder terrain than hierarchy and power. When someone chooses the language of art to say something in public, the way others see them can shift, and so can all their relationships – a process with consequences that cannot be planned, and for that very reason a way to address social imagination without relying on fixed methods, therapy or doctrine.

What does it mean to have a voice today? Who gives a voice to whom? Where can people speak without being told what to say? Over the years we kept sentences people let drop during breaks, lunches, interviews and meetings. They became handwritten words on a museum staircase, tagged letters on another museum’s wall, a sound piece played through cardboard speakers in a third. Karaoke – one of the most popular forms of entertainment, East and West – offered a new form: what if, in a glimpse of witty madness, one chose not to follow the lyrics, and instead recited a poem, sang an ancestral song, said a prayer, remembered someone who is gone, cast a spell?

In a polarised world, where democracy is slowly emptied of its emancipatory power and the efficiency of the technocratic authoritarian state begins to tempt, censorship works in both models: information is either filtered or drowned in a flood. We do not know how to face these monsters, but art means for us that we can still imagine something else. Like the actors of Pirandello’s unfinished The Mountain Giants, we came from afar as outsiders, hosted by other outsiders, to stage a story both private and collective: Chinese classical poems and old revolutionary songs, legends from Togo, tales from Mali, Creole spells, Italian and French poetry, computer language, pop songs, lullabies – and anyone in the public who wished to join in. The music, four scores by Fenni with live improvised interludes, ran from 6:30 pm to 2 am.

In Palermo the department was represented by Fenni, Wu Shuqing, Zhao Tao, Antoine Agudze, Sounkarou Dembélé, Blandine de La Taille, Tianji Zhao, Alessandro Rolandi and Christine Bernard; everyone else involved is credited in the video documentary. Once selected by the Manifesta 12 committee, the project was made possible by the continued support of the management and all the employees of Bernard Controls in China and France.

Manifesta 12 – Politics of Dissonance