I SHALL BEAR MY VISAGE (Or why I radically un-friend the tourist(s))

[Performative exhibition of obliterated objects and images]

Saturday 6th April 4 – 6pm at Market Gallery
Working within a framework of radical hospitality, artist AZ OOR presents a performative exhibition of obliterated objects and images. Over the course of an afternoon, the artist will contest and explore the dichotomies of tourism and fugitive presence, social facelessness and face recognition, border erection and hostility elections. The event will be structured around Moments of ponctuation (sharing words) and contemplation (viewing obliterated souvenirs). Another Moment will be to clean-out the exhibited objects (dismantling).

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Out of despair, with a face that bears the expression of utter hopelessness in the age of social facelessness, deep face, face recognition, biometrics, border erections and hostility elections, etc...; In what I call “Crisis of hospitality; crisis of representation”; I SHALL BEAR MY VISAGE.

Representation is first and foremost a political regime of maintaining the order. Commonly known as the representative democracy, that function with a capitalism of images, that is to say, images produced to represent the “people” in a way to substitute them (as the image substitutes Jesus), to maintain them outside. Out of the domain of praxis. If we look today at the crisis of activism, the agency becomes possible only in the “support” of the cause, not in its exercise. If the oriental spectre is haunting Europe today, the “immigrant” remains a ghost. It is due to a crisis of representation, the problem of “characters without narratives” haunting the western media. Ghosts are faceless people, peuples without visage(s), lives that cannot be mourned, because they are already lost. Nevertheless, they are ghosts because they transgress the borders, and the image.

Orientalism produces under the sovereignty of the empire(s), a massive quantity of images, of estrangement, fetishisms, and commodities, to maintain and define the order and their positions. All constitute a carcinogenic food for the economy of tourism. Tourism as an economy of racism that functions through fetishism.

This loss of Visage leads to a desperate attempt to recover or record what has been lost; visible in the proliferation of social media for example. Not only that but also the attempt of reparation finds its way in the economy of tourism. Not only that but also the loss of the visage in the image, and the attempt of the reparation, constitute the contemporary art itself.

If I recall the image here for its plasticity, I mean by the representation, its intentionality.

If the image, and therefore art, function in a way to provide and produce an image of the object instead of the object itself, this image is then an instrument of its extraction out of the world. Its inclusion by its exclusion at the same time. The exoticism, in the

etymological meaning: the outside. Thus, exoticization is pushing it into the outside. Represented, imaged, the objects are ipso facto situated outside.

In the obviousness of the visible, a disruption of the sensible is necessary. Un shrouding the image from the mystery and fetishism, does not requires an un-making of the images but the obliteration of the image(s) in the making.

In other words, I SHALL BEAR MY VISAGE in order to frustrate the distinction between political economy and art. Those words are not enough, and they shouldn’t be separated from their practice, because an act of hospitality can be only poetic, a direct poetry.

I SHALL BEAR MY VISAGE;

The visage. It is a visage, and only a visage that will not have an image, neither a representation.

A visage is non-duplicable, does not have its double, copy, portrait, clone, or ghost.

Hence, “bearing a visage”, is form of vis-à-vis, a face-à-face in its momentanity (that the capital sells us its reification), in its vulnerability, in its intimacy (that couchsurfing, Airbnb branded for us). The celebration of orality, the festal aspect of the Uprising and the insurrectionary nature of the festival.

Thus “Bearing my visage” is about being visible and its obliteration. It is about me, my voice, not the others.

I SHALL BEAR MY VISAGE, concerns the courage of hopelessness; the art of not being governed like that.

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I SHALL BEAR MY VISAGE can draw us into an old question: How could a society, that makes art and literature, commit the horror?