Research

… For now, I remain with these images of ‘the people’, ghosts of a democratic subject, reassembled in order that they might intervene in the present and become a new space of appearance in which they might glimmer with the hope of fireflies. To do so, however, they have to reintroduce a dark field against which they can be seen. This darkness is the registration of loss, a grieving, from which ‘a livable life’ can be recognised. This is what the images also withhold and,  in doing so perhaps constitute a preparation for politics, for action – a pre-enactment. Art’s use can also be this preparation, where grief is a beginning and new versions of ‘us’ are conjured from survival.   …

…it is my contention that the emblems, recalibrated through a series of transformations, might have the capacity to offer new ‘examples’ for how to figure the ‘inoperative community’, (a) community radically different from the ‘unities’ they once built and enshrined. This entails a shift from the political to the ethical, or at least a repositioning of the ethical within the political, that is to say, a respositioning of the ethical within ‘we’. And a reinvestment in …what I would describe as the affective forces of the unknown. It is here perhaps that art has a particular role to play…