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Tactics of Resistance

The Archive of Crisis and the‘Capacity to Do What One Cannot’

Elpida Karaba

ARCHIVAL ARTIVISM

The end of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-first centuryin the West have witnessed the impact of globalization, the demise ofcommunism in Eastern Europe and, recently, an economic crisis thathas generated shifts in the context of the European Union and, by exten-sion, in the organization of the global capitalist economic order. Theseconditions are having, as one would expect, a profound impact on a pol-itical and cultural level, at the centre of which lie identity issues and thechallenges faced by the nation-state and democracy. In light of recentdevelopments which added to this one more identity crisis – that of EUidentity 2 anxiety and uncertainty permeate relations among subjects,who are faced with the implications of the expansion of an unfetteredcapitalism, with the reality of the emergence of neo-colonial relationsamong the powerful economic centres and (economically) dislocatedperipheries.1 These relations are constituted while an apparently secureframework of alliance between powerful and ‘fair’ partners collapses.Once more the question of identity, of the ‘irrational wish ofbelonging’, of the rational need to construct a moral order becomes press-ing.2 The upshot of all the above is the emergence and articulation of newidentities that are antagonistic and oppositional in relation to those thatpreceded them. The late modern subject is forced to face the demands ofthis new condition.

In the artistic field, many different forms of expression haveemerged that have connected in a creative fashion with the intensifica-tion of this problematic. These have mostly been activist and performa-tive forms of art. The proliferation of such practices has produced apertinent term: ‘artivism’.3 It is a neologism – produced by the con-junction of art and activism – a conjunction which tests the limits of

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1. Loredana Stan, EuropeanIdentity, Economic Crisisand New Members States:The Romanian Case, http://www.fundacionideas.es/sites/default/files/AO_Loredana_-_Identidad_europea_ENG.pdf, 9 May2011, accessed 12November 2013

2. ‘In the context of the EU,this irrational wish ofbelonging to a certaincommunity is related to a setof common values –individual freedom, humanbeing dignity, rule of law,citizens’ activeparticipation, social justice,peace, etc, even thoughsome authors have doubtsregarding to what extentthese values represent adistinctive characteristic ofthe EU’, in ibid

3. See Aldo Milohnic,‘Artivism’, http://eipcp.net/transversal/1203/milohnic/en, accessed March 2003;Marion Hamm, Ar/ctivismin Physical and VirtualSpaces, http://eipcp.net/transversal/1203/hamm/en,2005, last accessed 1 July2012.

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each field, seeking to expand them through the ‘exchange’ of methodsand tactics.

This turn to an art which seeks to question the distinction of thoughtfrom action bears witness to the need for action, but also for acts whichdo not foreswear the importance of reflexivity, of a critical distancingfrom phenomena. This conjunction alludes in a way to the intentionof the artistic field to avoid an ‘overidentification’ with the otherfields of the social and to preserve the privileges of the ‘methods’ ofart, affording an alternative way out of persisting ideologiesaround art and its participants, as well as the dichotomous approachesto the question of theory and practice. In this article I chose toconcentrate on a practice that pursues such a way out: the artisticarchive as a democratic, public art, as a way of instituting artisticpractice ‘in law’.

The artistic archive has been often identified with collection and themethods of preserving memory. In its contemporary conceptualization,in the light of post-Marxist and post-structuralist theories, more emphasishas been accorded to the normative and valorizing intent of the archive.These theorizations recognize the importance of ‘authority’, of the powerthat lies at the core of the composition of each archive, be it formal,public, bureaucratic or artistic. In many postwar theorizations, thearchive was proposed as a mechanism that dismantles ‘official’ bureau-cratic and biopolitical archives. Such a perspective seems to be emancipa-tory; nevertheless it tends to surrender to the lure of anomy and anarchywithout making clear what it proposes in place of the structure that it dis-mantles. By contrast, the attempt to consider archive art beyond its identi-fication with an anarchic, private universe, redeemed through a fullliberation from the normative anathema, recognizes a productivepower, ‘a power that produces discourses, knowledge, pleasures’.4 Thisoutlook turns our interest in the public power of the archive towardsan ‘in-law’, democratic version of the archive, rather than an archive ofa ‘total exodus’. A version that reinforces its relation to the law and theinstitution, not as a conservative, authoritative function, but as a pro-ductive power, an original process of act and speech.5 A practice thatlooks forward to the future without being utopian, fantasizing a unifyingend. In such an instituting practice, as Gerald Raunig would call it, we canexplore the possibility of resisting the feeling of impasse, of indispositionand dislocation that besets subjects under the pressure of the currentcrisis.6 At stake here is a kind of archival ‘artivism’ which seeks to con-dense various fields in order to construct a different order of things (tocome). It regards the emergence of art practices that constitute in acertain way an expression of resistance to the feeling of impotence towhich we are often led by the impasses of the present condition. Suchpractices put forward art as a vital field in the search for a productiveway out.

For example, the project Archive of Mobile Structures by the Tempor-ary Services (TS) group, which aspires to compose different discourses ofthe social field (artistic, economic, communitarian) and to articulatedifferent artistic and non-artistic subjects, could be seen as such a case.7

The TS archive is a rhizome of artistic and non-artistic activities, collec-tivities, collaborations and networking. The activities of the partiesinvolved (ranging from mobile abortion units to temporary exhibition

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4. See Yannis Stavrakakis’spost-scriptum in GiorgioAgamben, Homo Sacer:Sovereign Power and BareLife (1995), Scripta, Athens,2005, p 288; my translation.

5. Cornelius Castoriadis in hisbook The ImaginaryInstitution of Society refersto the process of institutingand to the importance ofconstituting a society not inits bureaucratic,instrumental dimension butas an ‘original process oflegein and teuchein’ (mytranslation); CastoriadisCornelius, The ImaginaryInstitution of Society(1975), Rappa, Athens,1985, Polity, Cambridge,1987, pp 221–230.

6. See Gerald Raunig,‘Instituent Practices:Fleeing, Instituting,Transforming’, in Raunigand Gene Ray, eds, Art andContemporary CriticalPractices: ReinventingInstitutional Critique,MayFly, London, 2009,pp 3–12.

7. Temporary Services, ArtWork: A NationalConversation About Art,Labor and Economics, wasa project by a three-personart collective, Brett Bloom,Salem Collo-Julin and MarcFischer, based in Illinois. Itincluded a newspaper andaccompanying website,http://www.temporaryservices.org/ andexhibition. The volumeedited by TemporaryServices in 2009, Art Work:Art, Labor and Economics,is, as the title suggests, a‘Work of Art’. Here theconvergence of differentmedia – a journal, arigorous theoretical studyabout the economy, art,labour and a work of art –disorganizes the very meansused by each field in order toreactivate them, expanding,however, the possibilitiesand the fields of applicationof each one.

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art spaces), which are included in the archive, concern collectivities whichare constituted around artistic practices – works of art, installations etc –but extend beyond them to a form of ‘socio-artistic diversions’.8 The artarchive is presented, in this case, as an articulatory practice around provi-sional, precarious labour and conditions of living, prompting us to con-sider the possibilities that open up for the production of alternativestructures, linkages and coalitions. Even the video archive Disobedience,an ‘ongoing project’ curated by Marco Scotini and Nomeda Urbonas andGediminas Urbonas, which registers likewise a series of ‘socio-artisticdiversions’, features initiatives of ‘disobedience’ to the formal policieson urban planning and the regulations that organize and manage publicspaces. As its creators argue, the archive produces ‘a common space ora common base that is emerging. This space is not clearly defined, thusmaking it impossible to draw a precise line between forces and signs,between language and labour, between intellectual production andpolitical action.’9

Here, however, political action is not understood only as a literalmobilization, which will have a direct effect. At its centre lies an innercommitment that presupposes, on the part of both the creators of thearchive and its users, an ‘intimate dialogue’, which Hannah Arendt, inThe Human Condition, described as a highly active condition.10 Theuser is required to look for the necessary linkages between the localand the global mechanisms of action/reaction, to raise a series of ques-tions and to situate herself towards them, to develop a series of strategiesin order to broach and to unfold the archive.11

In that perspective one can understand archive practices that haveemerged in Greece, gradually coming to form a body of works thataddress the crisis in an immodest but critically reconstructive way.Archives are proposed as public works which do not just claim anatural space of preservation, installation and presentation but try pri-marily to produce a conceptual space that enables identities, conceptsand groups to detach themselves from specific, naturalized ideologicalimages. In that sense, in the construction of these archives crucial cat-egories for the subjects and society emerge and are revised, emptiedand reformulated. The project Archive Public, for example, was estab-lished in the city of Patras.12 Artists such as Stefanos Tsivopoulos,Nayia Yiakoumaki, Lina Theodorou and Gregorios Pharmakisarchive phenomena of immigration, retribution, of distorted identifi-cations. The project does not address these issues thematically buttries to re-enact the meaning of these categories using archives as amechanism to put in place an extended antagonistic public sphere,highlighting the way reactionary attitudes become mainstream. ArtistVangelis Vlahos, in his archive-specific work, often uses subtlesarcasm to challenge formations of meaning, identification mechan-isms and ideology structures. For example, in his work ForeignArchaeologists from Standing to Bending Position (2012), images arecomposed in such a way as to create a sequence of movement basedon the archaeologists’ postures. The work uncovers the history ofthe hidden subaltern relationship of Greece to Western powers,aiming at the creation of a distance from the phenomena in question,in order to mobilize a critical reflection on the roles of the subjects,both dominant and subaltern, involved in the crisis. Vlahos – via his

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8. This term is used by TanjaLesnicar-Pucko inMilohnic, op cit, http://architecture.mit.edu/art-culture-and-technology/event/disobedience-ongoing-video-archive.

9. Ibid

10. The concern with theforegoing functions andthe instituting character ofthe archive goes beyondbureaucratic arrangementsand concentrates on‘reversibility’ itself;Hannah Arendt, TheHuman Condition (VitaActiva) (1958), Gnosi,Athens, 1986. For Arendt,reversibility describes thedrive of ‘figures of thought’which can turn things‘upside-down’ at anymoment in history,without this being theresult of particular events,the result of historicalnecessity. Reversibilitycharacterizes theoverturning of fixedhierarchies.

11. Hayden White pointed outlong ago that the way inwhich somebody organizes(historical) information,the way in which she or heseeks to validate particularpieces of evidence, toestablish classifications,even the technocratic wayin which she or heorganizes files, labels anddocuments, condenses agenealogy of precedingcorrelations,interpretations and‘territorial logics’. Theinterest shown by thecreators of an artisticarchive in the way in whicha structure is organizedand constructed, in thetechniques of archivizationthemselves – even in thefinest technical details –questions and, at the sametime, enriches its function.Carolyn Hamilton, VerneHarris et al, eds,Refiguring the Archive,Academic PublishersGroup, The Netherlands,2002, p 90

12. ArchivePublic is acuratorial/researchprogramme at theUniversity of Patras,

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factual use of images and metaphorical titles – reverses and parodiesthe biopolitical processes of subjection performed by archival andakin apparatuses. The same end of reclaiming history is pursued bythe project ArchiveRights (curated by the author of this article)where artists study the art archive of ISET (the Contemporary GreekArt Institute) and present the outcomes of their study.13 The projectsraise issues that concern the Greek condition but extend beyond it.In the first presentation, What Would I Say if I Had a Voice?(2013), the projects traced the history of opposition and resiliencefinding productive resonances between past and present mobilizations;but at the same time they brought out the impasses of left discourse,the attitudes of self-pity and autovictimization, the attachment to agrander past. This is the case with the archive documentary of MaryZygouri, Opera Aperta: Pedagogic Performance for Adults (1980–1985), which focuses on the pedagogical work of the leading figureof Greek performance of the 1970s, Maria Karavela, and the configur-ation of the post-junta discourse.14

YOTA IOANNIDOU: PERFORMING THEARCHIVE OF CRISIS

We could situate the work of the artist Yota Ioannidou in such a perspec-tive. Ioannidou’s archives evoke in their way the ‘crises’ of the contem-porary condition, those which affect a particular locality – the Greekcase – but extend beyond it. The artist organizes projects which arebased on archives that she herself has constituted, following a processof research, collection, registration, organization and construction of

Ioannidou’s archive photo of the Palco factory, 2008, collection of the artist, photo: TinaKotsi

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supported by the KKaratheodoris fund. Theproject was presented inthe publication PanosKouros and ElpidaKaraba, eds,ArchivePublic: PerformingArchives in Public Space:Topical Interventions,Department ofArchitecture of theUniversity of Patras andCube Art Editions, Athens,2012.

13. ISET, the ContemporaryGreek Art Institute, is aresearch and exhibitionspace founded in 2009. Itsmain objective is to collect,preserve and elaboratecreatively a comprehensivearchive of postwar Greekart, contributing at thesame time through variousartistic, research andexhibition projects to thesupport and production ofGreek contemporary artoffering an intrinsichistorical context.

14. In the period following theyears of the military junta(1967–1974) up to thepresent day, a discoursehas emerged aroundmodern democracy, theevolution of mass politicalparties, the socio-historicalpreconditions leading tothe domination of thesocialist party PASOK(PA.SO.K), theconfiguration of theidentity of the ‘neo-Greek’,the entrenchment ofbipartisanship, the role ofthe left, and the rise of anextreme right wing.

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items. The ‘formulation’ and the exposition of these archives assumes adifferent form of performance on each occasion.15 In other cases, thearchive is published as a publication with textual and photographicmaterial, combined with a curated exhibition. Very often the artist optsfor a performative reading, of a kind that focuses on the performative,dramatized dissemination of knowledge beyond the formal versionsand readings of history, economy or politics. On other occasions, ittakes the form of a re-enactment or a related edition or publication inprint. In each case the performance of archives ‘refers to actions thatestablish a reality based on the iteration or displacement of (social)conventions’.16

In her project Stratagem (2009), dealing with the closure by PALCOof manufacturing operations in Greece and their relocation in theBalkans, the research/archive is published in a publication which isaccompanied by a series of public readings.17 Ioannidou exposes theimplications of the phenomenon of relocation, the gentrification of for-merly industrial areas and the condition of precarious labour – in thecase of PALCO, mainly affecting women. She organizes performativereadings of the book, voicing the side effects of these processes whichstart in a particular location but are, as in the phenomenon of the butter-fly, connected through a series of globalized phenomena. Ioannidoubrings out, through either orthodox or unorthodox reductions and con-nections, expanded side effects of otherwise unrelated data. As shesays, ‘data and finding within [the works] are not to be seen as a linearrepresentation, but rather as a structure of interconnected issues thatare taking place simultaneously’.18

At other times, the research/archive assumes the form of a perform-ance which leaves behind documentary material or props that can be

Detail from publication Stratagem, 2009, published by Dutch Art Institute

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15. The idea of performingarchives is developed in thebook edited by Kouros andKaraba, op cit.

16. Panos Kouros, ‘The PublicArt of PerformativeArchiving’, in Kouros andKaraba, eds, op cit, p 46

17. PALCO is one of thelargest internationalcompanies in underwearfabric cutting and seaming.Based in Greece until2003, it transferred itsoperations to the Balkansand Asia and lowered itsproduction costs byseventy-five per cent:information derived fromarticles in localnewspapers regarding theclosure of the factory, andfrom the daily nationalnewspaper Kathimerini,http://news.kathimerini.gr/4dcgi/_w_articles_economy_1_06/05/2003_62308.

18. Yota Loannidou,Stratagem, Dutch ArtInstitute, Arnhem, 2009,p 19

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used at will in other versions of the project. Such a performance con-densed Ioannidou’s collaborative project, Aula Intergalactica (2011),with the artist Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio, which concerned a researchand an archive bearing on the work and the action of the first Greekanarchist woman, Maria Pantazi, who took part in the ParisCommune. Ioannidou and Nerio focus on a person, the sole historical evi-dence for whom is a brief mention in the essay ‘Towards a History of theAnarchist Movement in the Greek Territory’.19 The artists, taking thelack of adequate information as a starting point, engage in a reconstruc-tion of Pantazi’s case, constructing and inventing connections betweenpast events which extend to the present. The construction put in placeby the artists connects the Bagua Massacre in the Amazon jungle in200920 with the nine-hour movement in the nineteenth century andepisodes that occurred during the Paris Commune.21 The minimalisticperformance which they chose for one of the presentations of thisarchive was based on few objects – a scarf, a mast, an apron, a flag –which constituted visual references to the relevant, elective photographicarchive put together by the artist. The reconstruction of the life of theanarchist Maria Pantazi, building upon the short paragraph about herincluded in written history, expresses the intent to give weight to the‘small letters’ of history, to readings between the lines through whichcases that would otherwise be ignored or misrecognized becomerevealing. The core of this archive is a minor story of a certain person.This story is deliberately related to a series of social struggles, producing

Aula Intergalactica, 2011, Athens Biennial, collection of the artists, photo: Maria Sarri

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19. Anonymous, Gia mia

lstorıa toy Anarxikoy

Kinhmato6 ston

Elladiko Xvro (Towardsa History of the AnarchistMovement in the GreekTerritory), book in thecollection of YotaIoannidou, also availableat http://ngnm.vrahokipos.net/

20. The Bagua Massacreoccurred in Peru’snorthern Amazon provinceof Bagua. The politicalcrisis in Peru resultingfrom ongoing oppositionto oil development in thePeruvian Amazon, withlocal indigenous peopleopposing Petroperu andthe National Police, cameto a climax on 5 June2009. On that dayPeruvian security forcesopened fire fromhelicopters into a group ofthousands of protestors inan attempt to break

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a network which seems to evoke and to invite a populist resistance toeconomic capitalist domination. Ioannidou’s archives call for a

. . . simultaneous movement or a peaceful insurrection of popular masseswho will be voicing their anger as victims of the crisis against its authorsand beneficiaries, and calling for a control ‘from below’ over the secretbargainings and occult deals made by markets, banks, and States,

in the spirit of Etienne Balibar.22 A populist resistance in response to othernationalist populisms.

In other cases, to exhibit the archive, Ioannidou opts for the practice ofre-enactment in order, as in the case of the project Restage Radio_A(ongoing since 2010).23 This project is dedicated to the radio station Soli-darity, set up in 1990 by workers fired from the Peiraiki-Patraiki factoryin Patras during the occupation of the factory. Ioannidou has gatheredmaterial from the programmes of the radio station based on the narrativesand the personal archives of people who took part in the mobilizations.The artist has reconstructed a radio programme from the dispersedpersonal archives of the employees who participated in the activities ofSolidarity radio. The fired workers of Peiraiki-Patraiki set up thestation so as to have their own ‘voice’, to express the justice of theirstruggle. The existence of personal archives, which have been maintainedby various people involved in the radio station, enabled Ioannidou toorganize her re-enactment. In it, the voices of workers fired in 1990join the voices of the current struggles of fired workers, the unemployedand people with no right to work. Today the memory of the formermobilization remains largely inactive and unconnected to the presentcondition. In contemporary globalized societies, where changesspread rapidly and uniformly without any possibility of adapting to par-ticular cultural contexts, such events become quickly disconnected fromthe history which gave rise to them, and they lose their contemporary

Aula Intergalactica, 2011, Athens Biennial, collection of the artists, photo: Maria Sarri

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through a road block –one of many throughoutPeru – that indigenouspeople had set up toprotest against the openingof the indigenousterritories to mining, oiland hydropowerdevelopment. See AlekNomi, ‘Remembering theBagua Massacre,Defending AlbertoPizango’, 5 June 2010,http://www.earthrights.org/blog/remembering-bagua-massacre-defending-alberto-pizango, last accessedAugust 2013.

21. In the mid-nineteenthcentury industrial workerslaboured ten to twelvehours a day, six days aweek. Inspired by Britishand American examples,Canadian unionists inHamilton, Ontario,launched a campaign for ashorter workday inJanuary 1872. In May ofthat year thousands ofworkers demonstrated inHamilton; they wereultimately defeated.Nevertheless thismovement was a landmarkin labour relations,winning workers the rightto associate in trade unionsand, eventually, a shorterworkday.

22. Etienne Balibar, OurEuropean Incapacity, 16May 2011, http://www.opendemocracy.net/etienne-balibar/our-european-incapacity, lastaccessed September 2011

23. This project was createdfor the researchprogramme KKaratheodoris,ArchivePublic: PerformingArchives in Public Art:Topical Interpositions; theresearch was conducted bythe author, incollaboration withProfessor Panos Kouros.

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relevance. By contrast, the establishment of the archive and its re-enact-ment occasions a reinvestment in the struggles, whose meaning isneither distant from nor unrelated to the present condition. The archivehighlights that even if some battles have been fought the struggle is notyet over. It becomes the nodal point of incomplete demands. The voicesof the former strikers join the voices of today’s disorganized labour sub-jects, and the archive activates the possibility, the potential of articula-tion. In such cases, a more practical, literal participatory performativegesture is triggered. The archive and the radio programme, as a differentpublic expression of the archive, activate the will to constitute a new pol-itical subject. The archive is a formation which seeks to reconstitute theidentity of the dislocated labour subject of late capitalism, a subjectthat searches for its agents, beyond any schemes imposed from above.Besides, as Ranciere puts it, the distribution of the sensible is the aestheticmark of politics, for politics turns on the question of who is to be heardand who is to be seen.24

As the different expressions of Ioannidou’s work show, her interest inthe archive is not restricted to an exclusive focus on documentary prac-tices. In her case the archive is an expanded formation, engaging witharticulatory exercises of art, labour and politics; it constitutes thenodal point of an enlarged artistic practice. As often happens in archivalartistic practice, it activates the media of different fields enlarging thepossibilities and the scope within each of them. The construction ofIoannidou’s different archives – whose common denominator isidentity and the struggle of different subjects at different moments inhistory – constitutes an articulatory practice. Her works areepitomized in projects which revolve around questions of power, politicsand gender and they are presented in the context of formal events in thefield of art, in galleries, international exhibitions, fora and in activities

Ioannidou’s archive photo from the Peiraiki-Patraiki factory, 2011, collection of the artist,photo: Yota Ioannidou

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24. Jacques Ranciere, ThePolitics of Aesthetics: TheDistribution of theSensible, Continuum,London and New York,2004

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which extend beyond the field of art, in occupations and similarpractices.

The dissemination of these archives, of their selective and oftenimpertinent material, if judged by the strictly scientific criteria ofarchive-making, in the frame of ‘socio-artistic divisions’ has the ‘advan-tage’ of enabling their presentation in very different contexts. In contrastto other structures, the hybrid character of the projects allows their cir-culation among formal artistic agencies, but also their presentation atconferences, festivals, NGO-run public events and other non-artisticactivities. This circulation facilitates the occupation of a prominent pos-ition in the realm of human affairs, in Arendt’s words, and it enables the‘appearance’ of particular subjects and demands which enter the stage ofhistory through the archive, claiming their own archive in this case.25

The critical reflection occasioned by the combinations that Ioannidou’sdifferent archives can generate is crucial to our understanding that asindividuals we bear responsibility for the articulations which we areseeking and that we ought to question the limits and the terms ofthese articulations.

Ioannidou’s particular archives, in the context of the ‘utterances’, thenetworks and the connections that they venture to create, produce a con-tingent construction of equivalence among different elements. The par-ticular archives of employees, fired workers, the anarchist woman andso on form contingent equivalencies and potential alliances.

ARCHIVAL INTERTOPICALITIES AND THEPOWER OF POSITIVE DECONSTRUCTION

Ioannidou’s archive becomes intelligible within the horizon of the artisticpractices which signalled the end of the twentieth and the beginning of thetwenty-first century, the artistic archives of the Atlas Group, TemporaryServices, DeColonizing Architecture, Urbonas, Park Fiction, and others.The different dynamic of such artistic archives lies in their alterative man-agement of the traditional organization of the archive. A collection ofpotentialities opposes and challenges the traditional notion of thearchive, as potentialities are not determined in representational terms.Artefacts included in the archive do not concern or represent events asthey occurred; nor, on the other hand, do they represent archives, asthey are archives themselves. Hence, they bring out or, rather, discloseshifts of historical potentiality.

Ioannidou considers the impact of economic phenomena on the Greekexample, which for some time now has been at the epicentre of inter-national attention, due to its extremely critical financial and, by exten-sion, political, destabilization. However, as is made clear by the verymaterial gathered by the artist, globalization turns on the dislocation ofparticular local structures but, at the same time, it makes all the moreapparent the network that connects many different and distant localities.On the occasion of the closure of factories by PALCO, Ioannidou refers tothe ‘transformation of workforce with specific salary contracts fromMongolia, working in the Czech Republic, and to the attempt ofvarious agencies to organize transnational labour unions’.26 In otherwords, the articulation of particular crisis management strategies is

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25. Arendt refers to the case ofworkers who enter thestage of history feeling theneed to wear their ownclothing, trousers ratherthan silk knee-breeches orculottes, for which theywere named sans-culottesduring the FrenchRevolution. To helpunderstand the meaning ofthis gesture, she cites ananecdote mentioned bySeneca that demonstratesthe canny instinct of theRomans: they rejected theproposal of the Senate todress slaves uniformly inpublic, not because thiswould reveal their hugenumber but because theywould be able to recognizeeach other and to realizetheir potential power.Arendt, op cit, p 297

26. Yota, Strategem, op cit,p 57

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revealed to be very urgent. The (archival) collection of material and,through it, the disclosure of connections and equivalences, and its disse-mination in different ways to different and distant audiences, can be seenas a method of articulation. In this sense, the archive is an affirmative newedifice, an articulatory dispositif. It does not consist of an anti-archive, arival formation whose meaning is reduced to its opposition to anotherparticular institution. The archive finds its meaning equally in the endea-vour to configure the new. What is at issue here, then, is an affirmativedeconstruction that challenges, on the one hand, the current state ofaffairs, but the aim of which is to organize the condition throughwhich particular ideas emerge. This condition enables the reiterationand the trial of these ideas in new frames and contexts. Her archivescan be seen as a web around which seemingly impertinent interconnec-tions are organized (among workers, women’s struggles, artistic actionsetc), as a nodal point of identities and possibilities.

The ‘locality’ of particular archives exposes the importance of everylocality; each should be treated as a special case that calls on us tostand together rather than offer our help, recalling the words of the indi-genous activist Lilla Watson: ‘If you have come here to help me, you arewasting your time. But if you have come here because your liberation isbound up with mine, then let us work together.’27 At the same time,with the formation of archives which bring out the particular features,

Archive photo from the Peiraiki-Patraiki strikers’ demonstration, 1993, collection of the

artist, photo: unknown

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27. In Sylvia Federici, GeorgeCaffentzis et al, eds,Shm1ivs1i6 th6 St1pa6.Kris1i6 gia thn Epoxh(Notes of the Steppe:Critical Reflections on OurEra), Ekdos1i6 tvn j1nvn

(Ekdoseis ton Xenon),Thessaloniki, 2011, p 53;my translation

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the particular conditions of each case, comes an understanding that theseparticular features may be very useful for the evaluation of analogousphenomena and the pursuit of politics of reconstruction. As George Caf-fentzis says:

If you want to know what will happen in Greece in the coming years, go totalk to the African street vendors and ask them what they have experiencedthemselves before coming here. In Greece things may not be happeningexactly as they happened in Africa, but if you want to get an idea abouthow mechanisms work, you have the experts, they are around you, andyou have much to learn.28

Of course, in the above one can see reductionism at work. While I wouldnot suggest that amongst different struggles and topicalities there arenecessarily connections and dialectic relationships, nevertheless I dopropose that one should consider both differences and also possiblesynapses in order to be able to design new critical oppositional structures.Both the particular features that connect and those that differentiatepartial claims make them louder, distinctive and stronger.

Ioannidou’s archives are set in the frame of an ‘experimentation’. The‘force’ activated through the act of composing her archives is orientedtowards the subjects who are seeking to find ways out of the conditionsof existence imposed by the present financial regime. Escapes can befound, as happened in the past, in the gaps left by the dislocation ofmany structures. In the spirit of Arendt, the archives organized by theartist are not an end in themselves. The archives do not follow and accom-plish the process, but they are incorporated in it.29 The archives createdby networks of ‘passive categories’ of subjects open up the perspectiveof an active implication of these subjects themselves – who are usuallyexcluded – in the construction of political establishments, institutionsand structures in the place of those that are being dismantled.30 Thesesubjects are the fired workers, immigrants ‘excluded’ from commonaffairs, ‘mobile professionals’, women whose story can be found in thesmall letters of historical events, women misrecognized by the system,or even women exploited and abused within the contemporary conditionof trafficking. The potential transformation of these ‘passive subjects’ intoparticipant agents conveys the conviction that the present condition is notirrevocable. It conveys the conviction that big ‘corporations’ and the alli-ances of the powerful are not invulnerable and omnipotent and that theirdemonization is not the solution, but rather that action and the buildingof alternative and international institutions can hold them in check, as therenewal and enactment of the moral and political law is the sole plausibleprospect.31 The constructions organized by Ioannidou define unexpectedconnections between particular subjects and, by extension, betweenmodes of living. With the ‘arbitrariness’ allowed by art, they make con-nections which do not yet look feasible; but they establish, nevertheless,a ‘precedent’, a condition ‘to come’, as Jacques Derrida would say.32

Especially in times of crises, coalitions become particularly importantfor individuals. Ioannidou’s work indicates, in a sense, coalitions yet tocome. In times of difficulty and strain, there is a stronger need for belong-ing in order to deal with different personal and collective struggles. Itcomes as no surprise that this has led to the resurgence of nationalisticand fundamentalist modes of belonging. Therefore, it becomes all the

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28. Ibid, p 67

29. Arendt, op cit, p 282

30. Martha C Nussbaum,Frontiers of Justice,Disability, Nationality,Species Membership,Belknap, Cambridge,Massachusetts, andLondon, 2006, p 52

31. See Thanos Lipowatz,Dhmokratiko6 Logo6,Cyxanalysh,Monou1ismo6

(Democratic Discourse,Psychoanalysis,Monotheism), Plethron,Athens, 2001, p 75.

32. On Derrida’s ‘democratiea venir’, see YannisStavrakakis, Lacan and thePolitical (1999),Psychogios, Athens, 2008,p 270; it does not rule outthe importance of promise,or the importance of thehuman affairs of hope andfaith.

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more urgent to construct practices that bring forward the complexities ofthe wish for belonging. Identity issues are always related to a set of valuessolidified in an accepted code of being that impels the individual to main-tain and defend it. It is crucial at this point to recognize that, on the onehand, a political position requires taking a position with regard to a par-ticular idea of justice and order, while, on the other hand, this positionshould disrupt singular notions of belonging and re-craft multiplenotions of belonging through a variety of struggles organized across mul-tiple axes of ‘difference’. In that sense the need for belonging and the cre-ation of a new order should be grounded in ‘alternative’ theories that seekto provide challenges to dualistic, narrow conceptions of community,refusing to be constrained by existing boundaries that emphasize separ-ation and difference based on naturalized categories of native andmigrant, national and local, masculine and feminine and the like.33

More schematically, the particular expressions of the archive produceparticular pictures which enable us to think how each of us responds tothese representations, and whether we want to choose these pictures inorder to articulate our aims and expectations with regard to civilsociety. Such an abstract exercise, as Martha C Nussbaum would say,‘has a practical importance [as it defines] our perception about what ispossible, giving us certain terms to designate ourselves and our politicalrelations’.34 Certain central categories – demands of human life – canbe defined in a rational and abstract way, universally and globally, inthis spirit. They can be determined globally, without losing their focuson the particularities of the local, as local initiatives and projects canform part of a global network, shaping a new kind of globality, asSaskia Sassen points out.35

THE ARCHIVE OF THE FUTURE:DOING WHAT ONE CANNOT36

Organizing archives of crisis – of social or economic crises, of identitycrises – does not concern merely the present. It is aimed more at thefuture archive which will unite absent generations (of past and future),the struggles of absent generations, with the present one, promising therise of the new.

The artistic archive sets out from the assertion that the ‘liberatedarchive of the future’, the archive-to-come, should enable people to con-stitute their social arrangements more deliberately and openly, aligningthem more fully with their own visions, demands and needs, makingthe most of the unexpected and the impertinent in art’s methods. Archivalart is a critical artistic practice, which is not reducible to a withdrawal topresent institutions, to an abstention from the process of institution. It isinvolved in these processes with a view to dislocating the actual discourseand the practices through which the current hegemony constitutes andreproduces itself, in order to constitute, however, another hegemonybased on the dynamic of the as-yet-impossible.

Hence, the ‘ethic’ that informs Ioannidou’s practice prompts us toponder the question of ‘activation’ or, rather, to relate this discussionto the ever more relevant – or even urgent, one could say – question ofaction in times when there is a pervasive feeling of impotence as to the

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33. The Derridean idea of the‘constitutive other’, ofdifferance and the ‘one thatkeeps some of the other’ (asdeveloped, for instance, inJacques Derrida, OfGrammatology, JohnsHopkins University Press,Baltimore, 1976; Writingand Difference, Alan Bass,trans, Routledge andKegan Paul, London, 1978;and Archive Fever: AFreudian Impression,University of ChicagoPress, Chicago, Illinois,1996), but also theincorporation of these ideasin the thought of ErnestoLaclau and ChantalMouffe (see Laclau andMouffe, Hegemony andSocialist Strategy: Towardsa Radical DemocraticPolitics, Verso, London,1985; Ernesto Laclau, NewReflections on theRevolution of Our Time,Verso, London, 1990; andChantal Mouffe, TheReturn of the Political,Verso, London, 1993) whoinvested in notions ofarticulation, antagonism,disclosing, hegemony andambivalence, as well as theaspects of exclusion andrepression contained inconsensus and any identityconstruction, are focalpoints of reference for thisdiscussion.

34. Nussbaum, op cit, p 415

35. Sassen Saskia, Hm1tatopish toy nohmato6

th6 Astikh6 Synuhkh6

(The Shifting Meaning ofthe Urban Condition) inKouros and Karaba, eds, opcit, pp 185–199

36. This relates to JacquesRanciere’s idea, accordingto which the reconceptionof the emancipatoryproject would have to relyon the capacity of theincapable; see Jan Volker,‘Proletarian Ideology orHow to Turn PoliticsAgainst Aesthetics’, inMark Potocnik, FrankRuda et al, eds, BeyondPotentialities? PoliticsBetween the Possible andthe Impossible, Diaphanes,Zurich, 2011, p 104.

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efficacy of our actions on a political and social level. It is a feeling ofimpotence which frequently produces anomic and irresponsible subjects,which is forged by the idea of impotent governance, of the politicalinability of states to establish fair conditions, which will not lead toincreasing inequalities. This is further reinforced by the aporia generatedby the present conditions as to which human acts are acceptable andwhich inappropriate, which are the criteria of rightness for our actionsand which criteria could define the way of life one could pursue. The het-eroclite character of the connections and the ambiguous nature of thefields which Ioannidou’s works seek to combine prompt us to considerthe terms of each coalescence and collaboration, be they orthodox orunorthodox.

We are prompted, by extension, to consider the need to renew theprinciples and the laws which inform the formation of alternative struc-tures and modes of life. In any case, populism can lead to catastrophes,as seen from other historical moments, and that is why we do not needan a priori populist movement but strong constitutional rules thatshould be observed, and, above all, the emergence once more of politicalforces in the European arena, which, as Balibar says, has introduced aculture of uncompromising democratic ideals and imaginary.37

DEMOCRATIC IDEALS BEYOND UTOPIAN PHANTASMS

As regards ‘uncompromising democratic ideals’, Ioannidou’s archives aresituated on the horizon of a non-utopian, democratic perspective, andthey constitute an act of ‘political performance’.38 They are not identifiedwith the law, but they become ‘law-like’. The law guarantees a certainform of justice, it faces us with the demand of the Other and rules outthe arbitrariness of the One or the Many. On this assumption, thearchive converges with the public democratic demand and becomes a par-ticular example of self-determination and autonomy.39 The ‘in-law’public archive becomes an exemplary exercise of a democratic ethos.‘Becoming law-like’ is an extension of Judith Butler’s idea about thenorms which become ‘law-like’ through iteration, re-enactment and reci-tation – practices applied by Ioannidou in her work. According to Butler,the possibility of a political intervention stems from the fact that identity,gender, existence itself are vulnerable to iterability and citationality,terms which she draws from Derrida. A political intervention requires adissimulatory process, through subjects which recite their identity perfor-matively, as Ioannidou does through her readings-lectures. Her archives– the law, we might say – produce this identity for a moment; they create,that is, the necessary point of a fictive origin. This process exposes thevery procedures through which certain identities and modes of existenceare legitimized, disclosing at the same time the distorted performanceswhich the established terms of our existence fail to articulate, and resitu-ates them in a certain perspective.40 The evacuation of a locus of power,of a meaning, a word, an institution, releases diverse possibilities forautonomy, new hegemony and legitimization.41 In light of these prop-ositions, the archives of PALCO, of the fired workers of the Peiraiki-Patraiki factory, constitute practices of a re-articulatory constitution.As the archive is associated with origins, history and foundations it

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37. Balibar, op cit

38. Drawn from the title of thechapter ‘Performativity,Iterability and Politics:Derrida and De Man’, inJames Loxley,Performativity, Routledge,London and New York,2007, p 88.

39. Cornelius Castoriadis inhis works refers to thespecial and necessaryrelation betweenautonomy and self-limitation. Without self-control it is not possible toachieve the autonomyrequired for a democraticregime, see YannisStavrakakis, The LacanianLeft: Psychoanalysis,Theory, Politics,Edinburgh UniversityPress, Edinburgh, 2007.

40. See Loxley, op cit, pp124–125.

41. Oliver Marchart, Art,Space and the PublicSpheres(s): Some BasicObservations on theDifficult Relation of PublicArt, Urbanism andPolitical Theory, 1999,http://eipcp.net/transversal/0102/marchart/en, last accessedJuly 2013

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becomes the point of a fictive origin, the starting point of a new history.And their instituting dimension constitutes them as an orchestratedorganization of agencies, language games, theory and practice, perform-ance, activism, documentation and re-enactment.

The production of such archives is an act that deliberately or inadver-tently produces stories, as naturally as construction is understood toproduce tangible objects. These are likely to be written down in docu-ments, in monuments, to appear in works of art or other useful objectsand to be reworked in materials of every kind. The question is how tomobilize the archive in the understanding of the identification processeswhich take place when engaging in a community or collectivity. Wecannot unconditionally perform the articulation of different agonisticor precarious subjects as an a priori positive development, but weshould appreciate in it the decisive role of their public appearancethrough an archive, and of the publicity and dissemination of theirdemands and their conditions of existence. Their public character consistsin their appearance in the public realm and, even more, in the search forand the exploration of points of contact with the public, which presup-pose the wider social context as their field of reference. These points ofcontact appear in the modes of distribution of the archive, in the explora-tory exhibition practices which are enacted in natural and virtual environ-ments, in the potential mobilization of social networking mechanisms, inits diffusion through mass media and in other similar practices which areactivated as strategies of articulation. In this sense, archive art is a publicart which places at the heart of its problematic vital issues concerning theconstruction of the public sphere, and it brings out elements of politicalactuality which do not become evident in other fields.

TACTICS OF RESISTANCE: ARCHIVAL POTENTIA

The material and the activities connected with these archives can be pre-sented and designated at times as art and at others as not. The process ofarchiving and research can produce objects, experiences, information;these can be politically enlightening, caustic, demanding, visually challen-ging, or simply aesthetically satisfactory, or all of the above. The connec-tion of different fields is intended to disrupt the way in which we stillthink of art and valorize it, the way in which we think of archives andthe historical value we attribute to them, the way in which we understandand valorize public space in Western societies. This process produces anarchival art of subversive information, an art of realizing lack, fortuneand contingency.

These archives constitute a collection of potentialities opposing andchallenging the traditional conception of the archive, as these possibilitiesare not determined in terms of representation. The artefacts in each archiveare figures which highlight or rather disclose shifts of historical possibility,in connection with a particular local context, but also extending beyond it.They are the enunciations of possible articulations and tactics of resistance.The features of particular cases are ‘condensations’ of art, activism, poli-tics, law and economy. The archive in this case performs an accelerationof condensation and at the same time provides a frame of reflection on con-densation, making creative use of the metaphoric aspect of language,

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without abusing this limit. It is an extradisciplinary expression which trans-forms the initial, isolated, disciplines, and opens up new possibilities ofexpression, analysis, cooperation and commitment.42

The different artistic formulations contained in these archives,installations, performances and re-enactments confirm, moreover, that theaim is not for art to get rid of its own ‘methods’, but to connect with a mul-tiplicity of social fields, putting forward its practices as forms of sublimationpar excellence, which as such ‘create a public space’, a unifying field.43

Ioannidou’s archives are constituted within the horizon of the ques-tions, the aporias and the demands of the contemporary condition, butalso of each particular location, such as the reinforcement of irrationalfantasies of totality in the context of national purity, and the perspectiveof a final exodus from the anathema of power. These very indicationsbear witness to the disruptions of the established system and simul-taneously to the need to resist the frustrations and the violence involvedin yielding to ‘solutions’ that dissolve any constant point of reference.They bear witness to the need to formulate new archives, archiveswhich reformulate the (symbolic) law which is proscribed in toto incrises and impasses. Hence the ‘in-law’ and instituting character of thearchive constitutes a particular practice of resistance to a particularcrisis, which is condensed in the principle of ‘reversibility’ that aspiresto the reversal of fixed hierarchies. Artistic archives can constitute‘figures of thought’, unexpected figures of reversibility.

The position of Ioannidou’s archives is not reducible to critique. Thearchive is not a manifestation of social complacency, but it triggers aseries of political consequences, seeking to constitute a different orderof things-to-come, ‘improper’ for the current condition. The productionof an archive is not a rationalist, instrumentalist process that fails totake into account desire, the subversiveness of parody, scandalous affi-nities, the importance of the slip. By contrast, having acknowledgedunconscious impulses, it throws itself into the adventures of desirewhich lie, however, within the horizon of potential (of the power ofpossibilities and the impossible).

The composition of these artistic archives expresses ‘affirmatively’ thedemand for social change, not in the overwhelming manner of a revolu-tion which yields to instrumental reason, proclaiming liberties andrights without being able to uphold and warrant them, or with the unhis-torical discourse of irrational fantasies of omnipotence which emerge evermore frequently in the present critical – local and global – condition.Ioannidou’s practice is not marked by the revolutionary disposition toattack or to eradicate the ensemble of existing institutions. This activityis symbolized in the discourse of the archives produced by her. In this per-spective, the archival works offer a potential way out of ideologiesregarding the role of art and its agents – which can be extended also toparticipants in other fields – at moments of crisis. The archival workstranscend the binary logic which opposes practice to theory, revolutionto reformism, art to life. In this sense, the archive can be seen as an exer-cise, a performance, an actual proliferation of practices, institutions,language games with a view to identifying a democratic, artistic (andnot only artistic) alternative, which enables us to think that even nowwe can claim the right of choice.

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42. See Brian Holmes,ExtradisciplinaryInvestigations: Towards aNew Critique ofInstitutions, 2007, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0106/holmes/en, accessedApril 2011.

43. Stavrakakis, The LacanianLeft, op cit, p 258

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