Year
2021
Tag
Installations
A picture of an explosion is easy to recognise as violence. A photograph of an office, a pavement or a family meal is less readily admitted into the same category. Yet the absence of an injury in the frame tells us very little about the conditions outside it. Before violence becomes an image, someone has already decided what deserves to be seen.
At the entrance to 730 Hours of Violence, we placed that decision in the hands of visitors. A tablet invited each person to choose an image of violence. A printer added the response to a moving paper loop on the wall. The next visitor encountered a definition already in progress, with room for another contribution.
Participatory installation · 730 Hours of Violence · Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona.
Installation documentation · 2021 · Silent excerpt from the exhibition camera archive.
The image we recognise
Judith Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence treats the naming of violence as a political problem. The term can be used to condemn a protest while leaving the conditions that provoked it unnamed. What appears to be a description also distributes legitimacy: whose actions require an explanation, whose suffering can be ignored, whose response is considered excessive.
For us, this made a shared definition more useful as a process than as a finished statement. The installation did not reconcile the different images into an agreed position. It kept their differences in circulation. An answer that seemed obvious on the tablet could become uncertain when placed beside somebody else’s.
A public loop
The apparatus was deliberately legible. A tablet, a plotter and a strip of joined paper connected the private act of choosing to a public surface. Rollers carried the paper around the wall, returning the printed images to view. The mechanism drew on Gilad Baram’s Printer in Loop, a formal reference for the work.
Printing changed the duration of the encounter. An image selected on a screen acquired a place among other images, and remained there for people who had not chosen it. The wall became a provisional record of how an audience understood violence, including the familiar pictures through which that understanding had been learned.
What stays outside the frame
Johan Galtung’s account of structural violence and Slavoj Žižek’s attention to the conditions behind visible events offered ways of reading the gaps in this record. Harm can be organised through ordinary arrangements: access to housing, the distribution of work, the terms on which a body is allowed to occupy space. Such arrangements rarely provide the decisive image that an explosion does.
The paper loop opened an exhibition concerned with these less conspicuous forms. It offered no final picture against which to judge the others. Its definition remained dependent on the next person to enter the room.
A continuous surface for a changing definition
A tablet, a plotter and a continuous loop of joined paper formed the working system. Pine supports, metal holders and PVC rollers guided the paper around the wall, allowing each contribution to enter a shared physical sequence.
Assembly study · An explanatory reconstruction from the exhibition archive. Components are separated for clarity; proportions are illustrative.
Materials & components
- Tablet and vertical support
- Plotter, ink and joined paper loop
- Pine supports, metal holders and PVC rollers
Selected references
- Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence (2020).
- Johan Galtung, Tras la violencia, 3R. Link to the Gernika Gogoratuz edition (1998); the exhibition cites a 2003 edition.
- Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (edition cited in the exhibition: 2009).
- Formal reference: Gilad Baram, Printer in Loop (2011).
Part of 730 Hours of Violence, an exhibition by Domestic Data Streamers at Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona, 7–30 September 2021.
This project received funding through the MediaFutures project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 951962. The work reflects the authors’ views; the European Commission is not responsible for any use of the information.
