KANTUTA QUIROS & ALIOCHA IMHOff - Overlapping Biennial

“A child’s play” (2010)
video
courtesy of the artist
Carla Cruz grew up in Portugal, a place that had recently and suddenly shifted from a fascist regime under communist auspices to a
liberal democracy that joined the Economic European Union, as EU was called back then. As a child, the artist felt the overwhelming
notion of being under surveillance; not of a ruling party, but rather of an omnipresent God. The influence of the Catholic Church had
a great influence on her upbringing, as did the mythical Carnation Revolution of 1974. Despite the overwhelming system of enforced
values and behaviors, Cruz, just like many other children, developed her own strategies for resistance and escape. In the artist’s
words, “turning inside out that self-control,” maintaining those values as exterior to oneself in order to acknowledge the difference
within the continually changing construction of the self. This form of “acting out”, which takes place between the limits of these
omnipresent systems of control, can be seen as an essential site of experiment for the development of the self. Given the increasing
parental presence and the ever expanding array of surveillance, kids nowadays have a different environment to explore. Even the
very meaning of “being together” has taken on new mediated forms due to Internet. Within this context, Cruz works with a number
of teenagers, employing drawing and interviews as means of expression. The place of children in society today is seen as a type of
sousveillance, opening up the space for a broader discussion on the community’s workings. Jason Waite
“These days I was thinking of surveillance in a Foucauldian approach, as a paradigm for a society of bio-power, centered around the
Panopticon; its conditions of existence, meaning the shift from a disciplinary society which controlled individual bodies. Each of us was
taken away, trained, bended, moulded and punished by a society organized around surveillance that ended up in self-surveillance. The
power is no longer interested in the singular body, but in the population, in the entire species. More or less at the same time, we have
Habermas writing about the end of the literary public space, where individuals used to meet for rational discussions and building the
public opinion (sousveillance?). Lefort was also talking about the democratic revolution - the beheading of the Prince (actually Louis
XVII’s) - the dissolution of the markers of certainty and the abstraction of the individual into a number, a vote that can be counted. It
kind of strikes me that they are all talking about the same issue, which is a democratic one, that everybody from Plato to Tocqueville
has feared and thought of...” Carla Cruz
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