You see it also here but all around the world in terms of feminism, the sexual minorities, the colonized that are in a whole process of decolonization. This is happening. At the same time, there is also a counter-reform going on with a full movement towards much more conservative thinking, ...
Also, happening now in all the underground, sub-alter movements that are fighting precisely to have access to the technologies of government, to the technologies of knowledge production, to the technologies of inscription. Yes, this is a revolution happening today.
What I can tell you is that, in the West, we are going through a double moment of, on one side, revolution. I would say that, yes, there is a revolution going on. That revolution not only happened in, let’s say, the 1960s as we traditionally think.
For once, even though, as I said the other day, I used to be a pathological utopist or utopian. For once, I think I’m going to play the other side. You have to apologize, maybe because I don’t know well enough the context here as to really be able to ...
Those are big questions that cannot be answered immediately and through a natural set of empirical elements. All of them have to be the object of a critical debate, have to be open for fictional and political imagination.
We are precisely questioning natural identity, that identity is natural. Identity is always culturally and politically constructed. Those alliances cannot be based on identity. What is a woman is still a full discussion. What is a man is still a full discussion, let alone what is to be Taiwanese or ...
Then, if you can do the same within nationalist language, you can also be fighting for this or that nation for this or that identity. If you go beyond that identity framework, then you have to start constructing, what I call, synthetic alliances, alliances that are not based on natural ...
I guess that has to do with leaving behind or going beyond identity politics. Which is, if you organize your fights according to identity politics, then women are supposed to be fighting for feminism. Gay people, whatever they are, they are supposed to be fighting for gay rights, trans, and ...
I think this is super interesting. This shows that, instead of fighting for gay marriage, for instance, we could be fighting to change administration codes. Basically, deleting certain codes or modifying them, or being able to rewrite other codes. This is a completely different discussion than just fighting for marriage.
How useful is this technology compared let’s say, for instance, to coding or programming now? [laughs]
This is like if this will structure all fights within the movement, and then we lose so much time when the actual questions today are like much more about accessing technologies. Of course, marriage is an institution and therefore is a technology, but is it the technology that we really ...
I think that what is interesting for me is sometimes to change the terms of the debate, because otherwise, it seems that within the movements, we keep saying like, "Oh, we have to get the equality right to, like equal rights for marriage."
That is a whole different discussion. We could also get into that discussion. It’s like why are we discussing with these notions that in a sense were colonial, so had nothing to do with the way of understanding sexuality within, let’s say, oriental culture and at the beginning, right.
It’s important for us to think that those notions, heterosexuality and homosexuality that we keep using as they are like rocks, they seem to be that they were in history forever. They’re medical categories that were invented within the 19th century, let alone that have nothing to do with the ...
This is one thing. Second thing, as I said before, the debate today within radical gender and queer movements is to get rid of gender assignation at birth. Therefore, if you think it well, if you do not have a paper that says that you’re a man or a woman, ...
I think this is a major question. It’s having access, the issue of migration today, is much more important than the issue of marriage. This should be at the core of any political discussion rather than marriage.
Therefore maybe at least from the point of view of gender and sexuality, I guess that and from experience we have in Europe or in the US in some of the places where they have acquired the right to, let’s say, homosexual marriage, for instance, or civil unions, what we ...
In which conditions, who is allowed to be a citizen of this world in which some of us are allowed to travel with a passport and have certain conditions and privileges and the rest of the world, which is the majority of the world, have right to nothing mostly? I ...
Why do we have to ask for this right? I guess that instead of getting entangled within the whole debate of asking the state for permission to get married or to get a civil union, we should start thinking about how becoming a citizen of the world is changing today.
I don’t think we should be asking for recognition. I think we should be very critical, or even it’s like why are we asking for permission to get married, even if marriage is a patriarchal institution that has to do precisely with a restriction of freedom of women historically?
They’re asking having access to the same institutions and the same legal norms than the other ones, right? The problem is that, first -- this is going to sound too harsh -- first we are asking for recognition to a state that, normally, is an agent of violence. It’s very ...
Transsexuals is always a problem, but anyway. Like, "Well, transsexuals, you as well, you’re just there." [laughs] "Well, yes, stay there. Don’t say much." You have all these people that are asking to be included and recognized by the law.
There are two different strategies. One that I would call liberal democracy, to come back to a more common way of speaking about politics. Liberal democracy in which you assume that everyone is equal in front of the law. From that point on, you say, "Men, women, heterosexuals, homosexuals..."
Big question. I think that this is an excellent idea. I don’t think it should be like a plan B. It seems like a consolation prize. Like, "Oh, we didn’t won the election. So, let’s go for plurality." I would say it’s a little bit the same discussion that I ...
Therefore, to breaking up the code and maybe collectively inventing other codes that go beyond this binary. I think that this is for me a different way of looking at the museum that being more inclusive and bringing the minorities is completely a different way of saying let’s radically transform ...
When you come to the museum, you don’t know what you’re coming for. I think this is the good thing about it, that we don’t come for anything. We come to ask questions, to criticize, to change the way we see the world and to do it with fiction and ...
For instance, if you go to the university or to the school, you’re supposed to be there to get a credit at the end. You go and you say, "I want to do industrial design." You better learn how to do it. [laughs] If you don’t do it well, then ...
This is what I think that the museum can become a radical democratic place. It might be one of the few spaces today in which all of us...
What would be challenging is trying to think collectively and therefore giving more access to the technologies of knowledge production and the technologies of artmaking to all of us to question what we understand for, let’s say, male, female, heterosexual or homosexual, and therefore go beyond those dichotomies.
Maybe it’s not just about inviting men or women or homosexuals or heterosexuals. This is ridiculous. This is buying into the identity politics.
I think that the challenge that we’re facing today, as curators or working within the institution, is precisely to change the epistemology of the museum. Can we open the code of the museum? Can we radically say instead of, "Oh, let’s make a feminist exhibition and let’s invite suddenly 20 ...
For a museum to be more queer, "Oh, let’s have more homosexual artists being exhibited." For a museum to be more decolonial, "Oh, let’s have more indigenous artists to be exhibited." I think that this strategy for me is still problematic in the sense that it contributes to naturalize what ...
I think that there are several strategies that have been tried out in different places. One of the strategies, that for me has become problematic at a certain point, is the strategy of identity politics and representation which is, basically, saying like, "OK, for a museum to be more feminist, ...
Anyway, but that’s why instead of posing the question as such an abstract level, it’s easier for us to maybe think if we want to think about like, "OK, can we make the museum more queer, or can we queer the museum, or can we de-patriarchalize the museum, or decolonize ...
It’s not possible that any kind of art will be like completely outside of politics even if it’s just like a beautiful, could be beautiful painting, but beautiful painting is painting according to the canon, and therefore, like reproducing a certain code.
Art and politics are never separated. Basically, art is always political, right. It can be a bit normative, conservative or it can be very critical, but there is always or it can, in a sense, it can repeat the normative aesthetics, or it can be suddenly like troubling that aesthetics ...
I don’t know if we mean this question maybe bring us back to the question of how to queer the museum that you mentioned before, Shu Lea? In the sense of for me, like asking the question of art and politics in such a abstract way, for me, doesn’t make ...
I don’t know exactly what, but maybe wait for what is happening today as well, that we arrive in Mars and that’s it. A recolonizing the world with the post-human being, something.
What I would be cautious about is precisely going into this very dystopic way of thinking, "Oh, we are in the post-human, and therefore, we’ve done away with any kind of political agency. We have to..."
For me, one of the things that I see your work, for instance, is activating this debate and being able to bring more people within that debate, including machines, including the Internet of Things.
What we could say is that what are the conditions for a certain body being a body, organic or non-organic, to be recognized as human and therefore to belong to a human social community, this is a huge political debate and has to be.
With the paradoxical side that at the same time that the European community is discussing this, the same European community is refusing the entrance within the European community of hundreds of thousands of refugees, therefore human, organic, and so on [laughs] that are trying to cross the Mediterranean because of ...
The European community has been recently discussing if robots can be considered legal people, legal persons. I don’t know if this debate is taking place here, but I’m sure even more than in Europe.
This is one of the things that we’re living with. We’re now in a kingdom where there are already also machines with us. This is not just only machines. Therefore, even machines will have agency and political agency as well. As you know, for instance, now, I don’t know how ...
What I don’t like so much when we immediately go into the post-human debate is that it seems that we’re just within the kingdom of just machines. There is no agency. Unfortunately, I would say that machines are our sons, our offsprings.
Even this difference between humanity and animality, between what is alive and what is not alive is also an object of constant political debate. This is constantly being discussed. Just to mention that you can go and see the post-nature exhibition upstairs. That, precisely, is dealing with this issue and ...
Maybe a body that has no language at all -- I do not refer to oral speaking but to language -- might not be able to be considered part of the human species, not be able to be welcome within a society. What is human is constantly being discussed. What ...
Within this living archive, there are carbon components and there are silicone components. The body’s not just organic. The body is made out of many different technological and organic components. Some of them are information-based. For instance, what is a body without language?
I guess that what is changing is what we understand by what a body is. I’m shifting the notion of the body and trying to move to this place, this notion and use the notion of somatic. It’s mostly in French when we speak about a bibliothèque to say a ...
Better.
