Manifesto
Manifesto of Parresiart
Brazil, 2021
A void seems to have seduced the souls of artists, conformed to the other-directed flattening of dissidence. Deprived of the art of opposing the barbarism of state abuses and engaged in pleasing the funders of commonplaces. Indifferent and complicit aphasia on canvas and in the square.
Art is intimately linked to freedom, as creativity draws from the source of freedom of expression. In tyrannical epoch, art represents the inalienable part of unlimited human creativity and the will for truth and freedom.
Long live the free gesture, instinct, and the irrational that exorcise the creative immobilism of authoritarian periods, but the historical moment requires creatively reaffirming freedom and truth, as critical thinking and doubt, foundational elements of reason, are adrift today.
We reject the schemes of political opportunism; we know we will be attacked, but we do not desist from the desire for a society based on non-authoritarian principles, and we use expressiveness as a means of human emancipation and its free political imagination. If it sounds familiar, it's because history is punctuated by this tension between the demand for freedom and the will of authority.
Placing ourselves in the groove of the ancient virtue of parrhesia, from a position of subalternity, we have the courage of truth and spit it in the face of power. We navigate political discourse on the ship of art. Parresiart is the art responsible for freedom.
The poetics of parresiart expresses the inner reality provoked by authoritarian policies and behavior modification implemented by intergenerational and transnational criminals who decide behind closed doors the fate of billions of individuals. Artistic resistance, far from pure art and the good intentions of the social function—often declined as mere propaganda of cultural structures—bursts into the heart of the vertical struggle, delves into fundamental issues, brings emotions and thoughts influenced by the observation of the political environment to the surface. Political reality not as a reproduced object but as a subjective re-elaboration of the unreal dystopia to which we are forced by a grotesque political-media sideshow managed cheaply and with blackmail by the money aristocracy.
Art as a philosophical and political expression of freedom, which is clumsily criminalized today, mocks the suffocating and ridiculous propaganda and denounces censorship, cleverly redefined as "fight against misinformation”, but in fact, a dictatorship of thought and a scientistic theology not unlike the famous Ministry of Truth or the past Inquisition, of which a certain progressivism was horrified, and now, with a fat belly and a starched collar, calls for opinion crimes for those expressing contrary views.
The individual is the ultimate decision-maker of their own fate in every field, by voluntary affiliation to groups that self-identify as political subjects. This must be reaffirmed by an art that rediscovers the taste of semantic and pragmatic rebellion, subversive of the prevailing illogical and in rejection of politically correct canons of globalist Agendas and, consequently, toothless arts.
An art for critics—not those of art that we gladly do without—but for critical minds, for those who live and practice doubt, for free souls that government labeling would like to downgrade as conspiracy theorists or something else to elide logical debate.
Opposition to cultural hegemony and the cancel culture that cultivate the homogenization of diversities to exercise global governance over populations and territories on a smooth cultural surface, with systematic linguistic reprogramming and mass production of fluid identities, thus unstable and manipulable.
The masters of steam and discourse—through pen-pushers and the armed arm of voluntary servants—use violence on every aspect of life with an invasive power in health, culture, pockets, intimate gestures, affections, words, and dreams. Thanks also to technoscientific zealots who provide the tools, they establish a technocratic, neo-feudal, hypodermic power, an ethical state that plans so-called emergencies to impose its dominance will with exceptional means, rushing towards the new speculative and governmental prairies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Today Power has technologies once unthinkable and wants to be exercised in the details of movements and thoughts, exchanges and consumption, under the skin of individuals, and forces everyone into video-monitored mega-cities, synthetic food, fluoridated water, and social credits, in digital ghettos and behaviorist beehives exploiting the new oil represented by data.
An eugenic power that wages fifth-generation wars against the peoples, controls the States and their monopolies, annihilates freedom, and humiliates and subjugates the individual. A totalitarian power that sweetens biopolitical programs with empty words like common good, inclusion, resilience, solidarity, sustainability, efficiency, and security; revealing its globalist nature the moment it distorts the protection of diversity by flattening true diversity: individuality free from usage manuals and the countless cultures sedimented over the centuries; that, in fact, works on new emergencies to confine men in open-air prisons called smart cities, where, by the hand of the single party under different banners, it would like to decide whether and what individuals should eat, if they can move, what they can say, what information they can access, what health therapies to impose, if, how, and when they can use their programmable money.
Historically, the use of coercion on the body has been enriched with sophisticated methods of mind manipulation. Force is not abandoned, as it is the ultimate guarantee of the preservation of hegemony, but it becomes secondary to the more efficient soft power, internal control through pastoral care, education, narration, propaganda, naturalization, stigmatization, simplification, repetition, isolation, and fear.
We are witnessing the formalization of the transition from clientelist capitalism to the idiocratic state, that is, government by private individuals or a private state, where the state no longer operates through public law but through private law. Constitutional charters are replaced by corporate policies to which the citizen-consumer can simply affix the signature of their adhesion. Thus, a new idea of corporatism takes shape—also in its philanthro-capitalist guise—renamed public-private partnership and conveyed through transnational bodies, regionalism, and the instrumental use of state apparatuses.
Therefore, an anartist resistance is needed that questions the legitimacy of authority itself, since what we call the State—in fact, a self-proclaimed elite—does not arise from a spontaneous pact among individuals but is the result of acts of force, the normalization of predatory powers that hide behind the scenes of the illusion of democracy and behind the lie of the separation of powers.
Artistic resistance that makes the indoctrination devices of 4.0 school, the disciplining and spread of cultural systems in history or medicine faculties, the mechanisms of perception distortion, and the propaganda of newscasts visible, processes of moral orthopedics, hypersocialization, and all the nauseating institutional mentality and respect for the rules of the strongest. To defend the towers of power, the admitted discourse must remain within the structure of the State, the conflict created and managed for predetermined long-term purposes, the political impotence of the masses made structural.
An art of resistance that helps recognize the dangers of the relentless digitization of life, of state-forming education and external authority, the divide et impera of right versus left fueled by the education-information industrial complex, of rules and platforms unilaterally established to strengthen control over subordinate classes. To decipher the instantaneous revisionism of dictionaries dictated not by linguistic use but by the need for governance, as well as the writing of history according to political opportunity. Parresiart does not want to educate but to dis-educate, to deconstruct the archipelago of institutionalized meanings.
A pragmatic function that stimulates political critical thinking through the use of the art object, which makes one doubt what is considered right or inevitable, such as tributes, inflation, copyright, political representation, or state monopolies. The work of art must dismantle common sense coordinates, lay bare the political economies of the population. The parresiast destructures the centralized narrative and reveals the intentions of planners, the role of parties, unions, journalists, and organic intellectuals, the deception of the programs of major political parties that confiscate the process of political innovation. To experience instead the search and creation of politics from below, local, made of real needs and interests of men, women, and territories, respectful of the intangible core of the person as an insurmountable wall against the man's dominion over man typical of totalitarianisms.
The debt and the accompanying green paper deception have reached the extreme, imperialism is now complete, the technologies are ready, the nations are integrated into the global market, and the cabinets are infiltrated; we are heading towards the reformulation of the existing order. Most likely, to establish the new, there will be a need for conflict, to create a distraction that diverts attention from the loss of freedom and because the post-war period allows planning the new without the legal frills of the old. Multipolarism is an empty word, all actors fight for shares of the same totalitarian paradigm that will emerge from the ashes of the old world they are destroying.
To artists and intellectuals, we say: if freedom is dear to you, you must counterattack the dark forces that act behind and through governments and international organizations, which consider humanity and peoples as cattle. Since today decent people seem to be ashamed to protest, and reasonable public dialogue is denied, let artists set an example, climb the barricades, and spread a culture of resistance.
Parresiart wants to give shape to an artistic action to protect the human, the natural, the rational, individual and local authenticity, mutual horizontal protection; in rejection of death biolabs, attacks on freedom of speech, movement, and exchange, new forms of digitized slavery imposed as a shared future. Without technophobic tendencies or anachronistic misoneisms and poverties, we consider scientific progress useful only if at the service of man, but today evidently derailed towards authoritarian forms of economic and technological dominance over man. And independent artists and intellectuals could suggest the levers with which to erode consensus and open up to political creativity practices.
We found a political artistic front, a contemporary vanguard that we define as parresiart. A legitimate defense against the bio-eco-ontological terrorism of the State, against the authoritarian and mechanized attack in various areas of existence, a lever to implement—theory and practices related to a vulgar technical-scientific behaviorism—the new model: an urban desert of post-rationality, post-subjectivity, post-intimacy, post-and trans-humanity.
In its desire to express, parresiart can forgo the ornamental care of the significant or insignificant to give space to meaning; to formal or informal research, which it holds dear, it prefers human and political substance: every language, medium, product, technique, tool, material, or element is allowed in the fight. Even when looking to the past, it does so to tell the story of the present. It extensively uses painted words for a political art that is also a satire of the single thought and gives voice to a widespread doxa forbidden by both artistic and public discourse.
We try to restore the sense of the absurd that they would like to pass as inevitable or desirable. We want to expose the functioning of the narrative flow of the oligo-monopolistic complex of information and entertainment, which devalues the filters of reason with the flood of shocking information, totalizing repetition, contradictory indications, neurolinguistic programming, and controlled opposition.
Our art action is the projection onto a support of an inner content stimulated by the observation of the unreal, a cultural reprocessing of programmed decay. We don't want to please the observer. Rather, we want to provoke them, shake them in their other-directed beliefs. For this reason—without aesthetic concern or ambitions of originality—we can use texts from the past that convey sets of meanings in widespread semiospheres, to adapt them to current issues through the remodulation of the signifier-image.
We try to give voice to the oppressed, the stubborn, the rebels, the humiliated reason, and the censored word through libertarian art contaminated by current issues, for the indivisible freedom of all. Freedom is responsibility, and it is a process, not an acquired property, therefore "liberation," a becoming, a continuous transformation: we will continue to be free, in the various forms of living together, if we continue to free ourselves every day.
Health and freedom.