HOLD OFF: THE TIME OF FUN
(2020-2023) IMMERSIVE INSTALLATION (2 REGIMES OF VIDEO, A SWITCH, LED PANELS, RASPBERRY)
HOLD OFF: THE TIME OF FUN is an immersive performative media project based on the reflection, reconstruction and speculation upon the phenomena of terror, the role of the state, hostages, and voluntary and involuntary spectators. The artist is using the economy of public attention – the asset making the terror efficient. She designs a reality of historical inevitability vs the reality of contingency due to speculation about the possible solution to the tragedy. The task can be solved with the active physical involvement of the audience mediated by the artist.
In my work, I focus on the economy of public attention – the asset that makes terror efficient. I immerse the audience in historical inevitability vs the reality of contingency due to speculation about the possible solution to the tragedy.
Before the viewer, there is a large double screen with a 5-hour video sequence compiled out of fragments of Hollywood action movies about terrorism, news insertions and programmes broadcasted on Russian television during the fifty-two hours of the Beslan hostage confinement. The time sequence of the Beslan event is presented in two versions on two led panels: one by the official media and another minute-by-minute of witnesses’ recollections. The second short ten-minute video is documentary footage of the first minutes after the assault. These frames can only appear if the viewer consciously releases the button that they must hold in their hands.
Through the gesture of holding a button or giving the button away to the participants, I want to recreate an affective situation of ethical impossibility. On the one hand, it gives a feeling of personal responsibility: the people are alive as long as one is holding the button. On the other hand, it provides the impression of the inevitability of the historical process. When one presses the button, it brings them to an ambiguous position. In the position of a terrorist craving for media attention or the place of a “situation hostage” who suddenly finds themselves with a button – be it one of the real hostages or a TV bystander, whose attention may be crucial in this crude political bargain, and whose indifference may be fatal for many. The bystander’s attention and involvement can postpone the inevitable and give the hostages a hope of surviving.
Before the viewer, there is a large double screen with a 5-hour video sequence compiled out of fragments of Hollywood action movies about terrorism, news insertions and programmes broadcasted on Russian television during the fifty-two hours of the Beslan hostage confinement. The time sequence of the Beslan event is presented in two versions on two led panels: one by the official media and another minute-by-minute of witnesses’ recollections. The second short ten-minute video is documentary footage of the first minutes after the assault. These frames can only appear if the viewer consciously releases the button that they must hold in their hands.
Through the gesture of holding a button or giving the button away to the participants, I want to recreate an affective situation of ethical impossibility. On the one hand, it gives a feeling of personal responsibility: the people are alive as long as one is holding the button. On the other hand, it provides the impression of the inevitability of the historical process. When one presses the button, it brings them to an ambiguous position. In the position of a terrorist craving for media attention or the place of a “situation hostage” who suddenly finds themselves with a button – be it one of the real hostages or a TV bystander, whose attention may be crucial in this crude political bargain, and whose indifference may be fatal for many. The bystander’s attention and involvement can postpone the inevitable and give the hostages a hope of surviving.
HOLD OFF: The Time of Fun
In 2004, more than 1,100 people were taken hostage by terrorists and kept without food and water for three days in a school in Beslan, North Ossetia-Alania, Russia. The decision not to give the people food and water arose when in the official announcement on public television, the number of hostages was diminished fourfold. The officials did not fulfil the fundamental right of the citizens to comprehensive information, and the officials did not facilitate any negotiations to release the hostages, essentially withdrawing their fundamental human right to live. Fifty-two hours of captivity saw the predetermined torture of 1,100 people, 777 small children among them, who were all packed into a school gym with wired explosives above their heads and with one of the terrorists or the hostages at all times holding the detonator button pressed. The point of no return occurred when a loud explosion occurred on the third day of the siege. Officially, it was reported that the explosion was due to a button released by one of the terrorists. The unofficial private investigation of Beslan victims[1] showed that there was an artillery shot from the outside by the Federal troops. The storming of the building began, and with it, the fate of hundreds of people. In all, 334 people died, including 186 children and more than 800 people were injured, making it one of the cruellest and deadliest events in modern history after 9/11.
So why now, after the invasion of Russian troops into the territory of the sovereign state of Ukraine, is it essential to talk about Beslan? For me, these two events have an undeniable connection, as they demonstrate the buttressing of the Russian state apparatus over the last two decades of Putinism and reveal specific markers that help us analyse the events that are now unfolding before our eyes. Beslan, in particular, saw the emergence of a consensus on understatement and manipulation tactics, and it paved the way for further aggressive propaganda, which has affected the majority of the Russian population to such an extent that it has remained loyal to the authorities even as the latter has committed flagrant crimes against that very populace. One of the crucial figures of this process was Margarita Simonyan, who at the time of her reports from Beslan was a 24-year-old journalist from Krasnodar, and whose reporting served as a career springboard: at the age of 25, she became the editor-in-chief of the RT channel (the former Russia Today, which changed its name to a more neutral one after the invasion of Georgia by Russian troops in 2008), which has become an outpost of propaganda targeting the West and taming the so-called Putinversteher. In two decades, the trajectory from a policy of understatement to full-scale propaganda and the distortion of facts in 2022 has led to military censorship, persecution, arrests and the gradual elimination of journalists and activists on the territory of Russia.
To trace this trajectory from understatement to post-truth, I will give an example that caught my eye at the end of April 2022, two months following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was an article published in one media outlet in exile, about a Russian who decided to become a contract soldier in the war. In 2004, 15-year-old Aleksey Ptakh was one of those hostages in the school of Beslan. According to his mother, contract service in Ossetia was one of the few social advancements available to the male population from this poor region. But the following aspect of the story was the most noteworthy: when asked by a reporter why Russia was fighting in Ukraine, Alexei’s mother replied that the news on the TV had said there were fascists there. After eighteen years of being lied to and a lack of a proper investigation into Beslan, the survivor’s mother did not doubt that the Russian state television told the truth.
In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoy Žižek writes about the spectacular effect of the attack on the WTC in New York in 2001. This appears to be another example of what Vilém Flusser began writing about in the 1980s, but the formalisation of the term happened in the 1990s, after the Gulf War. The spectacle is put on repeat; it is endlessly looped and leads to a stupor. “When, days after September 11, 2001, our gaze was transfixed by the images of the plane hitting one of the WTC towers, all of us were forced to experience what the “compulsion to repeat” and jouissance beyond the pleasure principle are: we wanted to see it again and again, the same shots were repeated ad nauseam, and the uncanny satisfaction we got from it was jouissance at its purest.”[2] Thus, the citizen’s right to information is replaced by the citizen’s right to a spectacle, and the same spectacle is used as a weapon of influence. Putin’s government has a different tactic. It is paradigmatic to the attitude not to negotiate with terrorists. No terrorist should get a chance for a minute of airtime. A citizen who has been taken hostage will also not receive a minute of airtime. A citizen with a TV remote control button will also not receive the portion of information they have the right to count on as a citizen. In this respect, all the actors: the terrorist with the button, his hostage and the viewer with the remote control – are symbolically equalised. Their rights have been reduced to a disturbing non-acquaintance and the expectation of an assault.
Laura Westra, in speaking about the state’s responsibility, coined the term Parens patriae – an ancient common law prerogative which “is inherent in the supreme power of every state… [and is] often necessary to be exercised in the interests of humanity and for the prevention of injury to those who cannot protect themselves”. She writes that this doctrine of protective jurisprudence, which dates as far back as the Middle Ages, has been used in its most recent instantiations to support judicial decisions that deal with the protection of those who cannot speak for themselves. In other words, it refers to the power of the state to act as the parent of any child, individual or animal who is in need of protection.[3]
The policy of silence has been an outcome of a paradigm formulated by the Russian authorities – the so-called “protection of citizens from aggressive information”. This iteration of the Parens patriae principle is also used to protect people from harming information about the state’s aggression towards its citizens, endowing the state to carry out necropolitical activities with the “children” of this state. The fact that Russia stubbornly did not recognise the right of sovereignty for Ukraine (the Orange Revolution in Ukraine began two months after Beslan) explains the attitude of the Russian military towards the civilian population of Ukraine dying under cluster bombs. These are the same as the children of Beslan, whom the supreme guardian can exterminate in case of need.
The citizen’s right to the spectacle is being replaced by an imported surrogate. While analysing the Russian TV schedules for the first three days of September 2004, while more than one thousand hostages were locked in the gym at the Beslan school, I found Latin American series, Hollywood action films, locally produced military documentaries and news broadcasts in which almost nothing about the events unfolding in Beslan was mentioned.
What caught my attention was the resemblance of the Russian military documentaries to the Hollywood narratives that constituted visual culture and have dominated as a visual product since the beginning of modern Russia. A common pattern for both products is a glorification of the state through the representation of a tall white young male commando killing terrorists. With them, he is rude and brief. He is soft and smiling with the hostages, who are given ten to fifteen seconds of airtime in the film. Usually, the assault takes place so professionally that not a single civilian dies.
***
“Empires communicate in two languages. One language is expressed in imperatives. It is the language of command and force. This militarized language disdains human life and celebrates hypermasculinity. It demands. /…/ The other language of empire is softer. It employs the vocabulary of ideals and lofty goals and insists that the power of empire is noble and benevolent. The language of beneficence is used to speak to those outside the centres of death and pillage, those who have not yet been totally broken, and those who still must be seduced to hand over power to predators. The road travelled to total disempowerment, however, ends at the same place. It is the language used to get there that is different.”[4]
In my work, I focus on the economy of public attention – the asset that makes terror efficient. I immerse the audience in historical inevitability vs the reality of contingency due to speculation about the possible solution to the tragedy.
Before the viewer, there is a large double screen with a 5-hour video sequence compiled out of fragments of Hollywood action movies about terrorism, news insertions and programmes broadcasted on Russian television during the fifty-two hours of the Beslan hostage confinement. The time sequence of the Beslan event is presented in two versions on two led panels: one by the official media and another minute-by-minute of witnesses’ recollections. The second short ten-minute video is documentary footage of the first minutes after the assault. These frames can only appear if the viewer consciously releases the button that they must hold in their hands.
Through the gesture of holding a button or giving the button away to the participants, I want to recreate an affective situation of ethical impossibility. On the one hand, it gives a feeling of personal responsibility: the people are alive as long as one is holding the button. On the other hand, it provides the impression of the inevitability of the historical process. When one presses the button, it brings them to an ambiguous position. In the position of a terrorist craving for media attention or the place of a “situation hostage” who suddenly finds themselves with a button – be it one of the real hostages or a TV bystander, whose attention may be crucial in this crude political bargain, and whose indifference may be fatal for many. The bystander’s attention and involvement can postpone the inevitable and give the hostages hope of surviving.
[1] http://pravdabeslana.ru/english.htm
[2] Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London and New York: Verso, 2002.
[3] Westra, Laura. Faces of State Terrorism. Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2012.
[4] Hedges, Chris. Recognizing the Language of Tyranny. Truthdig: 7 Feb, 2011.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/recognizing-the-language-of-tyranny/
In 2004, more than 1,100 people were taken hostage by terrorists and kept without food and water for three days in a school in Beslan, North Ossetia-Alania, Russia. The decision not to give the people food and water arose when in the official announcement on public television, the number of hostages was diminished fourfold. The officials did not fulfil the fundamental right of the citizens to comprehensive information, and the officials did not facilitate any negotiations to release the hostages, essentially withdrawing their fundamental human right to live. Fifty-two hours of captivity saw the predetermined torture of 1,100 people, 777 small children among them, who were all packed into a school gym with wired explosives above their heads and with one of the terrorists or the hostages at all times holding the detonator button pressed. The point of no return occurred when a loud explosion occurred on the third day of the siege. Officially, it was reported that the explosion was due to a button released by one of the terrorists. The unofficial private investigation of Beslan victims[1] showed that there was an artillery shot from the outside by the Federal troops. The storming of the building began, and with it, the fate of hundreds of people. In all, 334 people died, including 186 children and more than 800 people were injured, making it one of the cruellest and deadliest events in modern history after 9/11.
So why now, after the invasion of Russian troops into the territory of the sovereign state of Ukraine, is it essential to talk about Beslan? For me, these two events have an undeniable connection, as they demonstrate the buttressing of the Russian state apparatus over the last two decades of Putinism and reveal specific markers that help us analyse the events that are now unfolding before our eyes. Beslan, in particular, saw the emergence of a consensus on understatement and manipulation tactics, and it paved the way for further aggressive propaganda, which has affected the majority of the Russian population to such an extent that it has remained loyal to the authorities even as the latter has committed flagrant crimes against that very populace. One of the crucial figures of this process was Margarita Simonyan, who at the time of her reports from Beslan was a 24-year-old journalist from Krasnodar, and whose reporting served as a career springboard: at the age of 25, she became the editor-in-chief of the RT channel (the former Russia Today, which changed its name to a more neutral one after the invasion of Georgia by Russian troops in 2008), which has become an outpost of propaganda targeting the West and taming the so-called Putinversteher. In two decades, the trajectory from a policy of understatement to full-scale propaganda and the distortion of facts in 2022 has led to military censorship, persecution, arrests and the gradual elimination of journalists and activists on the territory of Russia.
To trace this trajectory from understatement to post-truth, I will give an example that caught my eye at the end of April 2022, two months following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was an article published in one media outlet in exile, about a Russian who decided to become a contract soldier in the war. In 2004, 15-year-old Aleksey Ptakh was one of those hostages in the school of Beslan. According to his mother, contract service in Ossetia was one of the few social advancements available to the male population from this poor region. But the following aspect of the story was the most noteworthy: when asked by a reporter why Russia was fighting in Ukraine, Alexei’s mother replied that the news on the TV had said there were fascists there. After eighteen years of being lied to and a lack of a proper investigation into Beslan, the survivor’s mother did not doubt that the Russian state television told the truth.
In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoy Žižek writes about the spectacular effect of the attack on the WTC in New York in 2001. This appears to be another example of what Vilém Flusser began writing about in the 1980s, but the formalisation of the term happened in the 1990s, after the Gulf War. The spectacle is put on repeat; it is endlessly looped and leads to a stupor. “When, days after September 11, 2001, our gaze was transfixed by the images of the plane hitting one of the WTC towers, all of us were forced to experience what the “compulsion to repeat” and jouissance beyond the pleasure principle are: we wanted to see it again and again, the same shots were repeated ad nauseam, and the uncanny satisfaction we got from it was jouissance at its purest.”[2] Thus, the citizen’s right to information is replaced by the citizen’s right to a spectacle, and the same spectacle is used as a weapon of influence. Putin’s government has a different tactic. It is paradigmatic to the attitude not to negotiate with terrorists. No terrorist should get a chance for a minute of airtime. A citizen who has been taken hostage will also not receive a minute of airtime. A citizen with a TV remote control button will also not receive the portion of information they have the right to count on as a citizen. In this respect, all the actors: the terrorist with the button, his hostage and the viewer with the remote control – are symbolically equalised. Their rights have been reduced to a disturbing non-acquaintance and the expectation of an assault.
Laura Westra, in speaking about the state’s responsibility, coined the term Parens patriae – an ancient common law prerogative which “is inherent in the supreme power of every state… [and is] often necessary to be exercised in the interests of humanity and for the prevention of injury to those who cannot protect themselves”. She writes that this doctrine of protective jurisprudence, which dates as far back as the Middle Ages, has been used in its most recent instantiations to support judicial decisions that deal with the protection of those who cannot speak for themselves. In other words, it refers to the power of the state to act as the parent of any child, individual or animal who is in need of protection.[3]
The policy of silence has been an outcome of a paradigm formulated by the Russian authorities – the so-called “protection of citizens from aggressive information”. This iteration of the Parens patriae principle is also used to protect people from harming information about the state’s aggression towards its citizens, endowing the state to carry out necropolitical activities with the “children” of this state. The fact that Russia stubbornly did not recognise the right of sovereignty for Ukraine (the Orange Revolution in Ukraine began two months after Beslan) explains the attitude of the Russian military towards the civilian population of Ukraine dying under cluster bombs. These are the same as the children of Beslan, whom the supreme guardian can exterminate in case of need.
The citizen’s right to the spectacle is being replaced by an imported surrogate. While analysing the Russian TV schedules for the first three days of September 2004, while more than one thousand hostages were locked in the gym at the Beslan school, I found Latin American series, Hollywood action films, locally produced military documentaries and news broadcasts in which almost nothing about the events unfolding in Beslan was mentioned.
What caught my attention was the resemblance of the Russian military documentaries to the Hollywood narratives that constituted visual culture and have dominated as a visual product since the beginning of modern Russia. A common pattern for both products is a glorification of the state through the representation of a tall white young male commando killing terrorists. With them, he is rude and brief. He is soft and smiling with the hostages, who are given ten to fifteen seconds of airtime in the film. Usually, the assault takes place so professionally that not a single civilian dies.
***
“Empires communicate in two languages. One language is expressed in imperatives. It is the language of command and force. This militarized language disdains human life and celebrates hypermasculinity. It demands. /…/ The other language of empire is softer. It employs the vocabulary of ideals and lofty goals and insists that the power of empire is noble and benevolent. The language of beneficence is used to speak to those outside the centres of death and pillage, those who have not yet been totally broken, and those who still must be seduced to hand over power to predators. The road travelled to total disempowerment, however, ends at the same place. It is the language used to get there that is different.”[4]
In my work, I focus on the economy of public attention – the asset that makes terror efficient. I immerse the audience in historical inevitability vs the reality of contingency due to speculation about the possible solution to the tragedy.
Before the viewer, there is a large double screen with a 5-hour video sequence compiled out of fragments of Hollywood action movies about terrorism, news insertions and programmes broadcasted on Russian television during the fifty-two hours of the Beslan hostage confinement. The time sequence of the Beslan event is presented in two versions on two led panels: one by the official media and another minute-by-minute of witnesses’ recollections. The second short ten-minute video is documentary footage of the first minutes after the assault. These frames can only appear if the viewer consciously releases the button that they must hold in their hands.
Through the gesture of holding a button or giving the button away to the participants, I want to recreate an affective situation of ethical impossibility. On the one hand, it gives a feeling of personal responsibility: the people are alive as long as one is holding the button. On the other hand, it provides the impression of the inevitability of the historical process. When one presses the button, it brings them to an ambiguous position. In the position of a terrorist craving for media attention or the place of a “situation hostage” who suddenly finds themselves with a button – be it one of the real hostages or a TV bystander, whose attention may be crucial in this crude political bargain, and whose indifference may be fatal for many. The bystander’s attention and involvement can postpone the inevitable and give the hostages hope of surviving.
[1] http://pravdabeslana.ru/english.htm
[2] Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London and New York: Verso, 2002.
[3] Westra, Laura. Faces of State Terrorism. Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2012.
[4] Hedges, Chris. Recognizing the Language of Tyranny. Truthdig: 7 Feb, 2011.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/recognizing-the-language-of-tyranny/
