KANTUTA QUIROS & ALIOCHA IMHOff - Overlapping Biennial

POLICE THE POLICE
MICA GHERGHESCU - CURATOR OF THE 4TH BIENNIAL OF YOUNG ARTISTS
The fourth edition of the Biennial of Young Artists (Bucharest 2010) opens with quite a hardly translatable mirroring word
pun: “police the police”. There is something tricky in the symmetrical construction of this message and in its automatically
imperative stance. It seems to have been captured in the net of mere illustrative restriction and imminent second offence.
Nonetheless, it would be rather superficial to see this statement as a militant and rebellious impetus only or as yet another
predictable and exhausted form of institutional critique. Instead, I would like to explore this year’s theme from another angle
of incidence, shaped by a certain polymorphism, stringently and ubiquitously present within the contemporary framework.
Policing ways of seeing are intimately linked to observance and surveillance strategies, to the relations between the observer
and the observed, to points of view and positions, to tracking and targeting techniques, to intermingled regulatory forms
of control, protection and discipline. Under these terms, police praxis and any visual study or historiography reach basic
epistemological complementarities, sharing the same decoding phantasms, same Morellian inductions and same indexical
reconstructions.
going Farther. I will introduce the counter-concept of “sousveillance” as a fertile and more indeterminate antiphrasis
for the notion of surveillance. Launched by Steve Mann as an accompanying notion for his hybrid cyborg surveillance and
mediating extensions, “sousveillance” literally designated a form of “appropriating the tools of the oppressor”, in a fundamental
subversion of any Panopticon logics 1 . In his actions, Mann used some of Internationale Situationniste’s concepts of
diversion, détournement and constructed situations. More recently and more locally oriented, Rob O’Copp’s Nottingham Office
of Community Sousveillance opposes community police officers, by thoroughly watching them and registering their slips.
In cultural critique analysis, Mann’s interventions or PCSO Watch counter-surveillance are only just two possible examples of
the so-called “culture jamming” phenomenon, an alternative form of media-activist guerrilla.
Similia similis, this creative transformation by appropriating the Other’s strategies can be paralleled with some reactions
that take place within an unhealthy human organism after a longtime treatment. The biological reaction is very complex.
Like bacteria, or viruses, the parasite agent adapts to the aggressive external chemical agents, wisely armed in defensive.
Deviant and often illogical, this provocative intruder changes its structure so as to find new answers, and strangely turns
poison into nurture; it develops organisms that work both ways, they turn the toxic into biological self, and they facilitate the
invasion and expansion into the host organism.
I invoke this notion today in order to confront it with other chameleonic artistic practices involving “sousveillance” in their
civic dilemmas. How do artists and cultural activists challenge this political topic in their works, how do they react to authority
and control in their own actions of counter-observance, how do they carry on their own investigations, how do they
advance speculations, shifting from “wakefulness” to “watchfulness”? How do they work “undercover” with dreaming of full
disclosure? And at what point the activism itself confronts with its own dissolution?
The theme could also be tuned on other frequencies. The difference between “surveillance” and “sousveillance” depends on
the very level of visibility concentration. In a recent text, Dominique Quessada explains this distinction between two fundamentally
opposed visual regimes: surveillance as concrete visual domain and the sousveillance as diffused visibility, as
digital occurrence: “this sousveillance detaches itself from clear visibility and enters the invisible computational order; even
for videosurveillance cases, it needs no eyes, either opened or closed. This observance stance is literally blind. In its hyper-
1. Steve MANN, „ ’Reflectionism’ and ’Diffusionism’: New Tactics for Deconstructing the Video Surveillance Superhighway”, in Thomas Y. LEVIN, Ursula
FROHNE, Peter WEIBEL (ed.), CTRL [SPACE]. Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, Karlsruhe, ZKM/ MIT Press, 2002
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