The Nationless Pavilion: for the Future of Community after Nation State
The Nationless Pavilion Laboratory heald by Denis Maksimov, image of the Leviathan, Sale Docks Venice 2015. Photo © Mohamed Keita
Political crisis of today is dictated by outdated nation state model of mapping the world. While all the other systems already spilled over with economy, art, science going global, nation state still draws the lines on the geographical map.
Political power and it’s redistribution is the heart of the issue. Advancement of human civilization, apart of providing technological leaps, also demanded more transparency and visibility from power. It has always been ‘catch and run’ game - with new strategies of mystification of political power into institutional forms of different kinds. Authority redistribution mechanisms always tend to appear impersonal as their function is to communicate idea of being ‘detached’ from the matter of defining good and bad, right and wrong. Ethical, moral and aesthetic judgment seem to appear to naked eye as something defined and proved by centuries of common societal work, where standards of normal are the result of careful, almost Darwinist selection of what is better for all. The mythology of this process was first supported by the narratives of religious dogma and power, while today it’s mostly relies on fear and ignorance. Ulrich Beck rightly highlighted one of the core characteristics of a modern life as the detachment from understanding of the basics of how this ultra-complicated world of ours works. Experts are supposed to decide what is good and bad, while comprehension of the verification mechanisms of their expertise is not an easy task for commoner. Expert networks include government, academia, economic and cultural elite, which are all intertwined through multiplicity of intersections within the hierarchies of confirmation of their expertise validity.
The Nationless Pavilion, Nation 25 Under Construction, Installation view, Sale Docks, Venice 2015 © Nation25
Epistemological processes of knowledge production and legitimization is strategically anything but transparent. The fundamental principle of the whole mega-structure is collective responsibility as silent conspiracy, bordering with plain nepotism. If I am demystified and going down, you are going down with me too, because the whole structure of validity behind our claims is constructed on mutual presumptions. The web of artificiality of social and political order demands almost religious belief in it’s realness. And if the certain structure is central to the multiplicity of these hierarchies, it’s guarded as a sacred cow by more than silence. It is supposed to actively reinforced by the actors in production of new ways to confirm the validity of ideological structure. It’s notoriously easier to imagine the end of the world, than end of capitalism not because of capitalism’s irreplaceability, but due to dependency on it’s rules and mapping of the roles and functions in socio-political matter overall majorities of the elites, contracted in unwritten and unsigned, but mutually understood by majority of them. When John Locke was speaking about social contract between state and citizens, he should have envisioned probably that not all the citizens sign the very same contract. All animals are equal, but realness, designed by the collective responsibility as silent conspiracy for value production and legitimization, proves that indeed some animals are more equal than the others.
The process of development of the Nationless Pavilion in the context of the 56th Venice Biennale ‘All the World’s Futures’ was launched in order to critically reflect on this complex subject. The chosen point of departure, the grounds of contemporary art, is strategic: because having the conversation about this at any other ground is by default ideologised and exists in opposition to dominating meta-narrative. The task of the curators seemed at the best impossible and at the worst plainly naive - can we envision possibility of alternative narrative of social construction beyond the known format the nation state?
Full version of the text by Denis Maksimov in DoppioZero International