Art and Counter-Hegemony

Sandra González

“I was asleep before. That's how we let it happen.

When they slaughtered Congress, we didn't wake up.
When they blamed terrorists and suspended the constitution,
we didn't wake up then, either.
Nothing changes instantaneously.
In a gradually heating bathtub, you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.”
The Handmaid´s Tale , Margaret Atwood

The essays by Iliana Fokianaki made go back in my mind to a moment that is

always there, like a very distant soundtrack, since I came to live to Bilbao.

October 2019 in Ecuador.

I was 9 or 10 when I learned that in the flag, yellow was for the sun, that made sense
at that time because I live in a very hot city. Blue was for the seas and rivers we had
and red was for the heroes that died to free us from the colony.

I always try to be stupid and oblivius, I think I would be more happy, but life doesn´t let
me.

In January, I had a discussion with my sister, because she didn´t want me to make
“more trouble” complaining about injustice everywhere I go, and simply pass through
life and try to come back home safe. Three days later, the news came out about a
woman, not much older than me, (actually the cousin of one of my best friends.) She
and her 5 year old son were poisoned to death, by her boyfriend. I finally told my sister
that I cannot go through life like anything is happening or like injustice is a normal step
I should bear.
Nobody goes from point 0 to 100 in one day, nobody just one day wakes up and
murders his girlfriend and a 5 year old boy, and simply goes to the beach afterwards.
There are surely a million times that injustice happened before and nobody spoke
about it. Or somebody was always covering up injustice.

Going way back in time, to October, after 10 days of non-stop protests and violence
from the government in October 2019. Nobody was the same afterwards. I remember
sitting in my bed more than once, looking at the wall, very worried, wondering if I
should still come or stay, helping more people not be dehumanized. What is the use of
having so many degrees and critical thinking if I can't stop bullets.
I want to talk about a form of control that makes me even more afraid, than militarized
control, technological control, violence control, etc. And that is how people have
internalized these systems of control as the right way to live.

One of the scariest parts of this time, was to watch people, see the same images and
not get horrorized by this. People, very close to me, “educated” people, say that it was
right that the state should control like that. “Protesters were criminals just ruining the
economy of good people” especially if they were indigenous people. Hell is other
people…
Connected with the current situation with COVID-19 in Ecuador, this situation in
October was a trailer of a very scary video game where you could very clearly see who
was in which side. Most people that are more likely to have the privilege to still be
alive in this pandemic, are the ones that protect the neoliberal´s control system.
People who actually believe that the virus is spreading more because people are “bad”
and “stupid”, and are not able to make the connection between the system and the
situation.

For me that is the most scary part of this macabre worldwide situation, that we think
and laugh about people like Donald Trump getting into U.S. elections, but then they
get there and it´s not funny anymore. But still, we keep going, and the one day we
wake up poisoned.

The most dangerous thought, I might add, is to think that those things wouldn´t
happen to you. So why should you care.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQEN7YuZ-4U

Not noticing that individuality doesn´t exist and that is what this virus is mostly trying
to teach us. We are equally contagious, we are equally responsible of spreading this
disease, the virus reveals that frontiers are unreal.

If we have the privilege to stay home, probably, is because we have taken, without
noticing, possibilities for other people that can´t stay home, we have equal possibilities
of being disposable for the system, and we are living the hunger games and I´m kind of
scared to think that we might get to the handmaid´s tale chapter of this weird
dystopian reality we got ourselves into.

Not long ago, I got into another argument with a girl that is not that close to me. I
published in my social media, a kind of dark joke that showed a policeman shooting
someone, and it said “That policeman could have been an abortion”. This girl that hasn
´t had many problems in her life (I haven´t either, for the record.) Told me that I
shouldn´t respond to violence, with violence. That wasn´t the path to change if I
consider myself a feminist.

This is one of the things that most bothers me about my brain, is that I think when I
was born, I was injected with a serum of the red pill that morphs offered to Neo in the
Matrix. I can see everything connecting.
So I abstained to say that the capitalist system uses military and police forces to
protect the people that control the system. But you cannot get to do this to anyone. In
Latin America, we fight for the right to abortion, not because white privileged women
can't have an abortion. They can, just they do it in secret, in safe clinics for cost poor
women cannot do it. So for poor women that are usually girls raped since a very young
age, they have two options dying in an illegal abortion that can be made in even in a
slaughterhouse for animals, or having the baby, and still loosing her chances of having
a “normal” life with education.

So what happens to those girls that become mothers, maybe to 2 or 3 children before
the age of 25. Those girls that most probably won´t finish school, do not have
possibilities of getting a “respectable job”. Those girls that haven´t even finished being
girls before they become mothers, they don´t have possibilities to educate their
children in a better way.

So the system has cooked the special source they need to do to get more policemen
and soldiers, lumpen. Because men (mainly men) that cannot access to a better
education, have no access to other options of careers, so they have the chance to
protect the system that puts them there in the first place. So, yes, that cop killing
someone that probably is in a similar situation than him, could have been a legal, safe
and free abortion.

Like Dirk Gently always says “everything is conected”.

“This is not an adequate response to what might be not only the end of
democracy as we know it, but the end of art. We cannot continue to mind our
own business and remain silent in the face of violence, in order to maintain our
membership in the flock. For under the pretense of neutrality, we hide our
complicity. The only way out of this poly-axial conundrum of the slow/fast,
eso-/exo-violence of narcissistic authoritarian statism is to expose its
multifaceted modus operandi, while we propose, imagine, and produce forms
of counterpower.” – Iliana Fokianaki

There is a phrase that I read a few months ago that made me think about my
impossibility of reading anything without trying to find the connection of it in the real
world. I feel there is this notion that philosophy, anthropology, art, or any social theory
is somehow separated from daily life, and that invisible notion, is just to keep this
imaginary privilege of academic educated people from lumpen and in order to
reproduce another way of classicism instead using this knowledge to create paths to
positive change.

“The body constitutes a deposit of metaphors. In its economy with the world,
its limits, fragility and destruction, the body serves to dramatize and, in some
way, write the social text.” – Canibalia, Carlos Jáuregui.

Metaphores are theory for me in this quote, and they work through our bodies and
they cannot be separated. The system doesn´t want critical thinking to be massive or
thought in that simple way, for obvious reasons and we cannot stand impassive, while
that happens. I see art , theory and education as bridges of improvement.

Also as very good ways to build memory and history. Im doing an online course about
afro literature in Ecuador and I loved that the teacher told us to try to stop looking at
history as a line and to start looking at it, as breeding ground. Because we don´t go
from 0 to a 100 in one day, and that can be also used as a tool.

Thats what I liked about situationist, because we need the anarchy of not wanting a
system that stands in the same way (Dada) and the possibility to imagine within
ourselves, different ways to see the world (Surrealism). But not like a hallwark card, or
a book that simply stands in a shelf, but as an actual different way of seeing and living
our lives. The answer is not in checking the same hegemonic voices over, and ove, and
over. We need to start listening more carefully to other voices.