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holidays in the country – this martial form of tourism is
no longer needed: all you have to do is buy a ticket in
Yugotours.’ What would the innocent Marquard think
those Germans tourists are doing in Yugoslavia in view
of the historic course taken by the zone since the
independence of Croatia?
Giorgio Agamben suggests the opposite in State
of Emergency. The likeness he establishes between
the figure of political law that is the ‘state of emergency’
and the festive practices of the carnival – and of any
other festival that allows anarchy – can help us to
better understand that political dimension of the
carnivalesque chronotope: ‘Anomic festivals dramatise
that primary ambiguity of legal systems and show,
at the same time, that what is at stake in the dialectic
between those two forces is the very relation between
the law and life. They celebrate and parodically
reduce the anomy through which the law is applied
to chaos and life only on condition that it itself, in the
state of emergency, becomes anomy, life and living
chaos. And the moment may have come to try to better
understand the constitutive fiction that, by joining law
and anomy, also guarantees the relation between
law and life.’ It is curious that where the social conflict
is taking place between the institutions of power
and the antagonistic revolutionary movements, both
elements are being combined at once, the application
of ‘emergency measures’ by power to repress
dissidence and the adoption by the dissidents of
‘carnivalesque’ practices with which to bypass the
total control power exercises over the public sphere.
Agamben’s political idea – re-reading Walter Benjamin,
‘in fact, politics is only the action that cuts the link
between violence and law’ – which identifies the
state of emergency – paradoxically in a sphere of
political resolution linked to the state in revolution –
as the rule that governs the state of affairs of the
historical period we happen to live in – from the world
wars to the present day police wars of the empire –
finds its visual simile in the anomic practices, in the
festive cycles of the carnival. And just as Agamben
points out that there can be no ‘return’ to the state
of law because, as the ‘state of emergency’ is at
the very foundation of the state, it has questioned the
very concepts of ‘state’ and ‘law’ and that it is by
looking deeper into this anomic state of affairs – ‘where
danger is, what saves us grows’ to follow Hölderlin –
in which we must liberate life, the uses and human
practices of life that the powers of law and myth have
tried to capture in the state of emergency.
It is strange how for Giorgio Agamben the defence
of Walter Benjamin by the English Marxist Terry Eagleton
also leads to the carnival and especially to its
consideration through Bakhtin’s prism. The transmutation
of revolutionary messianism in a time of permanent
carnival seems to come from Benjamin via both the
‘mystical’ path and the ‘Marxist’ path. The consideration
and study of this anomy as a source of instruments and
tools for political action also finds an endorser in
Eagleton from a conviction that the political character
of all artistic practices may be reached by delving into
their language rather than allowing oneself to be swept
along by any reason of conscience. The point is to
establish a common root between Bakhtin’s carnival
and Benjamin’s Apocalypse. According to Eagleton:
‘Only when body and image have interpenetrated
within technology in such a way that all revolutionary
tension becomes collective bodily stimulation and
all the bodily stimuli of the collective become a
revolutionary discharge will it have transcended itself
to the point demanded by the Communist Manifesto.
The imaginary of the carnival through which Bakhtin
organises the libido of the collective ‘physis’ promises
to materialise for Benjamin in the historical forces
of production. Because the body counts itself among
those material forces and is also inscribed with images
produced on the superstructure level. By using
technology to generate new images, experimental
art can intervene indirectly at the base, writing the
body anew to align it with the new tasks presented
by a transformed infrastructure …’
An empirical confirmation of the similarity between
holiday and revolution has been provided for us by
Manuel Delgado in Carrer, festa i revolta, his study of
the symbolic uses of public space in Barcelona between
1951 and 2000. It was a reading of this book that turned
the work of F.X. Archive in Badia towards its festive
cycle, leaving its little record of revolutionary struggles
– if we can call them that: demands for independence,
residents’ struggles, etc. – for another part of the
investigation. Though it was there, in the festivals of
the carnival cycle, that we had to concentrate on
applying the effects of our FEKS. Of course, for Señor
Josep, our blind informer, the crime his story of our
photograph ends with took place in land now occupied
by Ciudad Badía, but we cannot give too much credit
to that datum.
Let us return for a moment to Agamben’s text to
understand why we chose the carnival festivals and
Easter Week as the object of our work. In his book State
of Emergency he says: ‘And so the anomic festivals
point towards a zone where the maximum subjection
of life to law is turned to liberty and licence and the
most frenzied anomy shows its parodic connection
with the “nomos”: in other words, towards the state of
emergency effect as the threshold of indifference between
anomy and law. In the showing of the sorrowful character
of all festivals and the festive character of all mourning,
law and anomy show their distance and, at the same
time, their secret solidarity.’ It is true that the fact
that a major emigration from the south of Spain has
populated Badia since its beginnings has marked
the celebration of those festivals and that my reference
points, Seville for Easter Week and Cádiz for carnival,
condition these works in some way. The inversion of
the sorrowful and festive characters was guaranteed
simply by the operations these festivals have suffered
by being transported to Badia. That eccentricity turns
the simple development of the festivals in its streets
into a strange agent who, as such, disseminates
estrangement.
What we wanted basically was to present the
carnival as Easter Week and Easter Week as the carnival.
There are historical reasons for that as demonstrated
by José Luis Ortiz Nuevo in ¿Iconoqué?, a text
presented at the F.X. Archive Television Laboratory.
For example, a large part of the figurative substrate
of the via crucis of Easter Week is to be found in the
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