Between
poetic justice and legal imagination
Elena
Sorokina
In: Newtopia: The State of Human Rights
Exhibition
catalog
In
the 1970s, the human rights movement opened a space for utopianism
rarely seen before, winning on both the political terrain and that of
the imagination. The utopian dimension of human rights has been
extensively discussed by researchers including Samuel Moyn, who has
stated that human rights have a ‘recognizably utopian program: for
the political standards it champions and the emotional passion it
inspires, this program draws on the image of a place that has not yet
been called into being. It promises to penetrate the impregnability
of state borders, slowly replacing them with the authority of
international law. It prides itself on offering victims the world
over the possibility of a better life.’ (1) Human rights ‘evoke
hope and provoke action’. (2) The ideals of citizenship and
altruistic political participation, democratic cohesion and social
solidarity are expressed in the human rights principles, and as
Étienne Balibar maintains, human rights still constitute the primary
democratic tool for the contestation of both power and political
disenfranchisement.(3)
Despite
this utopian dimension, contemporary art is considered an unlikely
site for human rights, and yet, a rights-based approach and ideas of
rights have been increasingly present in recent artistic expression.
The projects I would like to discuss in this text take human rights
as their sites,
approaching them as the highest moral principles, political ideals
and legal norms. These projects have developed a specific set of
strategies in relation to human rights, assuming positions of defence
or accusation, pleading for justice or playing the role of an NGO.
They demonstrate how artists can use the principles of human rights
as a deconstructive tool, unsettling fixed definitions of democracy,
identity, inclusion and exclusion. They revolve around acts of
contestation, resistance, civil disobedience (or on the contrary a
radical ’civil obedience’), as strategies that challenge some of
the current interpretations of human rights by those in power. The
projects themselves have a double life – they exist as actions and
as installations, spaces of ‘legal utopias’. Including strong
archival elements, these utopian spaces stage particular
relationships between documents, authors and spectators.
One
of the strategies used is a perhaps counter-intuitive approach of
radical ‘civil obedience’. This strategy can be traced back to a
fascinating but little-known chapter of the dissident movement in the
Soviet Union. Alexander Volpin is considered an originator of this
technique of confronting an autocratic state.(4) Volpin defied any
easy classification — poet, mathematician, and lawyer, he was
engaged in the dissident movement since its very inception. He is
considered to be the author of the famous action on Constitution Day
in 1965, the first unsanctioned organized civil protest in the Soviet
Union, which marked the birth of the civil rights movement in the
entire Eastern bloc. In 1965, at the peak of the Cold War, an
organized civil protest within the Soviet territories was
inconceivable. Instead of openly challenging a regime that would
immediately criminalize such an attempt, Volpin decided to do the
opposite. He insisted on ‘official’ constitutional rights. Like
every constitution, the Soviet constitution was full of good
intentions and grand declarations; it guaranteed, for example,
freedom of assembly or transparency of judicial proceedings. In
reality, of course, these were never followed, and never claimed. And
this is where Volpin's strategy of an obsessive lawyer came in –
the laws, he claimed, should be obeyed exactly as they are written,
and not like the current political regime interprets and handles
them. Thus, he called upon the Soviet regime to simply obey its own
laws and international obligations, including the Helsinki Accords,
signed in 1975. A major breakthrough for the dissident movement in
the Soviet Union was article VII, which called for ‘respect for
human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of
thought, conscience, religion or belief’. Taking ‘socialist
legality’ not just seriously but literally, Volpin was the first to
realize that an effective method of opposition might be to demand
that the authorities observe their own laws. All projects discussed
here can be, to some extent, related to this strategy, which the
artists adapt to the different times, different social conditions and
different problematics.
The
civil rights of citizens and the human rights of aliens
The
installation J'accuse (2012) by Kader Attia presents a series of
black and white photographs in the manner of a succession of film
stills – showing people in the subway station, leaving the subway,
running up the stairs of the Musée des Colonies, and deploying
banners.
The people are of mixed origins and they are engaged in a common
action of protest:
an unsanctioned 'occupation' of the museum
in support of the sans-papiers, which took place at the end of the
1980s. Since
then, and for a certain period of time,
Attia worked with two Paris-based NGOs (Droit Devant and Droit au
Logement) fighting for the rights of immigrants (many of whom came
from the former French colonies). He was often asked to document
their actions, and such is the case with the present series.
One
of the banners, hastily deployed by the protesters, asks ‘14-18,
39-45, they died for France, did they have their ID papers?’ It
refers to a long-neglected part of French history – the so-called
tirailleurs
sénégalais.
Tirailleurs
(sharpshooters or foot soldiers) were foreign combatants of light
infantry recruited in the French colonial territories. Deployed in
battle since the nineteenth century, they fought in both world wars
on the French side. In 1939, it has been estimated that some 120,000
men were mobilized from French colonies in Africa; yet their
role has until recently been largely forgotten in both France and the
African countries.
For
the protest action, the activists established a direct connection
between the neglect of the tirailleurs
and of immigrants today.
In
his installation, Attia reinforces this connection, juxtaposing two
archives: the images of the protest shot during the occupation of the
Musée des Colonies ,
and photographs depicting the
tirailleurs
from the nineteenth century onward. In stark contrast to the
spontaneous energy of protest, the photographs of the tirailleurs
represent a military iconography – well framed shots of poised,
organized, and disciplined colonial soldiers. What connects these two
archives and their distinct temporalities is the timeline of the
occupation of Musée des Colonies, which is drawn directly on the
exhibition wall. The Musée is a perfect site of visibility of
colonial appropriation and oppression. Built in 1931 for the colonial
exhibition in Paris, the museum and its symbolism spans the period
between the time of the tirailleurs
and today's sans-papiers. The museum's successive renamings traverse
France’s evolving perception of its colonial present and past: from
the unequivocally proud representation of imperial power as the
Museum of the Colonies, it turned into the nationalist Museum of
France Overseas and later into the Museum of African and Oceanian
Arts. Since 2007, the site became the National Site of the History of
Immigration.
To
'occupy' is not only to hold a space, but also to claim symbolic
spaces for one's own messages and objectives, subverting their
original meaning. The Musée
was occupied in order to make visible the opposite of its original
message – the rights of illegal immigrants, and their 'right to
have rights'. Occupation is an ambivalent word; it can refer to
appropriation, colonization, invasion and conquest. Here, Attia lends
resonance to them all. By occupying it, the illegal immigrants
exercised a temporary spatial control of the Musée.
While expressing their claim for historic justice, the tirailleurs
and their descendants also symbolically occupy the space of the
archival installation and thus take the place in history Attia
insists they deserve.
Archives
emerge from a desire to understand, share, discuss and represent a
space of resistance against natural or state-organized amnesia. In
this vein, Attia's archival constellation evokes a case that recently
shook France. After the colonies' independence, the compensation for
the veteran tirailleurs
was frozen at the 1959 level while the French citizens' pensions were
adjusted to inflation. This official amnesia was finally broken in
France when it became a legal case between the French state and the
former colonial combatants, who claimed their rights and accused
France of discrimination. After years of negotiation, the court
finally established the principle that payments should not vary
according to a soldier's origin. However, it was not until 2006 that
the compensations of colonial soldiers were increased – but of
course, many of the veterans were by then dead.
Attia's
installation gives this legal battle its historical depth and
contemporary resonance. It celebrates the archive as a source of
evidence of acts of resistance against discrimination and the
immigrants' wider struggles. In exposing the dilemmas related to this
case the work reveals personal and official histories of the colonial
and postcolonial periods as they have progressed in France. The
installation organizes different archives into spaces of reflection
that together form an exhilarating exploration of the broader dilemma
of the civil rights of citizens and human rights of the aliens.
Famously described by Hannah Arendt (5) and developed by Jacques
Rancière (6), Attia locates this problematic in the concrete
historical context of France's colonial past, the social exclusion of
France's growing immigrant population, and the recent heated debates
on national identity. The title J'accuse
refers to the Dreyfus Affair, but also to the legendary anti-war
movie by Abel Gance of 1919, which quoted Zola's call for justice. In
this context, Attia's installation can be read as both an accusation
of the non-fulfillment of the country's own principles of equality
and non-discrimination, and a space of poetic justice. Ultimately,
the tirailleurs
do occupy both – the colonial museum in the 1980s and the space of
the installation today.
A
Space of Exception
Seamus
Nolan's work is also based on an emblematic and striking legal case,
which challenged the official position of a country – in this case
Ireland, and what it considered 'right' at a particular moment and
political situation. The case at the core of Seamus Nolan work Every
action shall be judged on the particular circumstances
(2008) has been one of the most controversial recent trials in
Ireland. In February 2003, the group Pitstop Ploughshares, consisting
of five members of the Catholic Worker Movement, damaged a US plane
on a stopover in Shannon Airport on its way to Iraq using hammers and
pickaxes. When arrested, the Ploughshares declared it an action of
protest against the war in Iraq and Ireland's participation in it.
Ireland is a neutral country, but it nevertheless provided the
Shannon airport facilities for the US Army planes. The resulting
legal battle was enormously controversial. The activists faced
charges of criminal damage up to two-and-a-half million dollars and
up to ten years imprisonment. After several re-trials and extensive
legal arguments, the judge agreed with the defence to apply the
'lawful excuse' to this case. The law allows for damage to property
when the persons doing the damage honestly believe they are trying to
protect lives or property of others; in this case, the defence
justified the Ploughshares' actions on the grounds of human rights,
as they were defending the innocent civilians caught up in the war in
Iraq.
Nolan's
installation consists of objets
trouvés,
or, rather, objets
utilisés
– objects used in this protest action. The hammers and axes
exhibited were witness to this long and controversial legal history.
They have been termed weapons, evidence of criminal activity, icons
of civil disobedience, and tools of disarmament and human rights.
Most of them carry anti-war or religious slogans engraved into their
handles. The installation includes one more element – a painting of
the same hammers by the celebrated Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick,
responsible for the iconic portrait of Che Guevara created in 1968.
Entitled Pax
Christi,
the painting depicts the hammers as symbolic objects of peace, the
establishing of which is perhaps the most compelling of human rights.
Nolan
displays these objects as 'legal relics', the 'hammers of justice',
combining them with the extensive documentation of the case, both in
print and the audiovisual media. In juxtaposing objects and their
legal and media histories, the installation becomes, as in Attia's –
an archive of evidence of a legal battle. But in the context of
Ireland after 9-11, it also raises the issue of the massive retreat
on human rights in the western world since then. In its declared 'war
on terror', the Bush administration introduced anti-terror
legislation, arguing that the extraordinary circumstances justify the
suspension of law and the introduction of a state of exception. This
led to the suppression of civil rights (the Homeland Security Act)
and the establishment of spaces where neither international nor US
law apply (Guantánamo Bay). The result, as Judith Butler observed,
was that 'the stateless are terrorized by the distinction between
state violence and "terrorism", an artificial and
politically opportunistic distinction enforced by governmental
power'.(7) These policies resulted in the indefinite and potentially
permanent suspension of the law, including civil liberties that many
take to be constitutive of democracy.
In
his installation, Nolan challenges this logic of perpetual exception
on the basis of human rights. (8) Peace is more important than the
government's military obligations. Human rights principles are more
important than temporary political alliances, and engagements into
warfare, which the country's population do not support. While
articulating these claims, Nolan's installation creates its own
'space of exception', defying the state's strategy. The installation
establishes his own 'exception of exception', suspending the logic of
the illegal war and the normal juridical order in which the temporary
alliances, political deals and 'realpolitik' prevail. In declaring a
space of exception for human rights, Nolan asks the government to
obey its own laws, as much as Attia does.
Civil
Disobedience versus Radical Civil Obedience
Marina
Naprushkina's installation presents a different type of archive – a
record of her own work from diverse periods. Her practice consists of
both making art and organizing actions of protest to highlight the
disregard for human rights in her home country. Situated between art
and activism, Naprushkina's main area of engagement revolves around
the oppressive regime in Belarus – which remains a Soviet style
dictatorship within Europe, with a state-controlled economy and
persistent human rights violations. The country's government
continues to persecute the non-governmental organizations,
independent journalists, national minorities, and opposition
politicians. Belarus is the extreme case in the former Eastern bloc,
but Naprushkina's work also reveals a painful dilemma of the
post-communist situation in general. The Soviet system, autocratic
and oppressive, firmly guaranteed economic and social rights: work,
housing, free medical care and free education. After the system's
collapse and the instalment of neoliberal order, the economic rights
were gone for ever, while social freedoms only slowly found their way
into the new country’s national agendas. This is the case in all
former Soviet countries, Belarus being an autocratic extreme
protected by Russia.
Knowing
the country's grave deficiencies in depth, Naprushkina acts as a
one-woman NGO whose base is art. She operates as a critical
intellectual, urban planner, educator, publisher, propagandist of
human rights and agitator for feminism; activities reaching the level
of a self-nominated opposition candidate. One of her projects is the
newspaper-comix 'Belarusian Self-Government', which she produces in
Berlin, presents in exhibitions and clandestinely disseminates in
Belarus with the help of the local NGO 'Our Home'. In the first
issue, the artist started with very simple questions: who decides on
social rights and guarantees? Who is and should be in charge of a
good level of life, work, housing, medical treatment, education,
pensions? And how could people make decisions and claim their rights?
In response, she outlines several ideas – more or less utopian or
realizable in the present circumstances – trying to design a social
and economic alternative for her country with her own means. In
addition, clearly accentuating a didactic tone, the newspaper
reprints some basic principles of the Belarusian constitution. In
contrast with the real situation, this constitution states that
Belarus is a democratic country based on the rule of law whose only
legitimate source of power is its people. In reality human rights in
Belarus aren't even a smoke screen; they are just decorative
declarations without any legal value, performative utterances for
solemn events. However, as part of her strategy, the artist decided
to take them seriously and ask Belarusian people, what if they really
existed and were implemented?
Without
drawing a direct parallel between the strategies of Volpin's 'civil
obedience' in the Soviet Union, and Belarus today, some of
Naprushkina's political and cultural activities do come close to his
spirit. Naprushkina's newspaper claims something, which for the
current Belarusian standards looks like a legal utopia: human rights
are guaranteed, the economy runs for the mutual benefit of all
participants, and innovative potato growing strategies conquer the
European markets... In this case, the artists legal imagination is
based on the theatrical strategy of the suspension of disbelief, also
used by Volpin: let's act on the assumption that we have rights, and
can decide on the future. How can we effect change and what happens
after the regime of the current autocrat Lukashenko is gone?
Exclaiming this in a utopian fashion, the artist invites people to
think of how to start building a rights-based future out of the
regime. For a task such as designing a country's future policies, art
might not the best possible tool. But as the curatorial collective
WHW has observed, 'it might be the only one'. (9)
All
three projects translate the artists' 'legal imagination' into
installations using the strategies outlined to different degrees –
claiming rights which exist in a gesture of a radical 'civil
obedience', asking the governments to obey their own laws, or
establishing a space of exception for exception. But all of them
consider the rhetoric of rights as ideas in permanent construction.
In line with Balibar's analysis of democracy, human rights are not
'here to stay', they have to be earned as each individual takes up
his or her civic responsibility. (10) Exposing the nature of human
rights as moral principles and legal entitlements, the artists also
tap into the major dilemma of the human rights debate still
persisting today – showing ways to a better compromise between
utopianism and realism. As Samuel Moyn maintains in this book: ‘It
seems odd to say that the utopian imagination has to start from the
real world. But when it comes to international human rights, it is
clear that utopia and reality do not exclude each other, but rather
depend on one another. At least, the hope in human rights norms and
movements, which germinated in the last part of the twentieth
century, emerged from a realistic assessment of what sort of
utopianism might make a difference’.
1.
Samuel Moyn, The
Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010
2. Ibid.
2. Ibid.
3.
Etienne Balibar, ‘What is a Politics of the Rights of Man?’ in
Masses,
Classes and Ideas.
New York: Routledge, 1994, pp.205-226
4.
The life and work of Alexander Volpin is insightfully discussed in
the publication by Benjamin Nathans, Aleksandr
Volpin and the Origins of the Soviet Human Rights Movements.
Seattle: University of Pennsylvania, The National Council for
Eurasian and East European Research, 2007
5.
Hannah Arendt, The
Origins of Totalitarianism,
Andre Deutsch, 1986, p.277
6.
Jacques Rancière, ‘Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’,
South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3 (2004) pp. 297-310
7.
Judith Butler, ‘Guantánamo Limbo’, The
Nation,
1 April 2002
8.
Giorgio Agamben, ‘A Brief History of the State of Exception’, in
State
of Exception.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005
9.
What, How and for Whom/WHW. What
Keeps Mankind Alive?
Istanbul: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, Nejat Eczacıbaşı
Binası, 2009, p. 35
10.
Balibar, ibid.