REALITY TERROR -1 contemporary call-

We all very well know that things we perceive to be real today, almost everything we attribute a meaning to, as well as labels, identities and belongings attached to us, are not absolute or infinite. It is necessary to rethink and question our daily experiences on the basis of not only human affairs but also in terms of the relation we establish with the ever-developing technology of our day.

The information bombardment we experience each day, thanks to television programs, commercials, clichés of the fashion and entertainment industries, sweeps away all there is that is ours. Continuously habits, belongings, identities and meanings undergo an ever accelerating deconstruction. Different political parties and opinions increasingly become indistinguishable. Daily lives ruled by so-called discourses of democracy begin to resemble each other all over the world. After ideologies and every cultural, sexual or political identity we ever fought for in the past, have lost their meaning, a variety of identities and belongings now seem to appear in front of us only reduced to a form of “life style” and “image” ranging from leftism to nationalism, from homosexuality to religiousness. Due to these similarized daily images transformed into some sort of pornography, we are on the verge of facing a new kind of pressure, censorship and attack which we can call the “reality terror”.

We are deliberately suggesting this metaphor of “reality terror” with the intention of uneasing you about the world we believe to be living in and seem to have an endless faith to be for real. For the boundary between reality and fiction has long been destroyed and overstepped, therefore here we are left, with no reality or basis to give as a reference to any meaning or value we believe in.

In a world where almost everything can be reduced to images, can it be that the meaning of politics, economy, sexuality and art has vanished forever? Explosions of words replaced by censorship, logic of production assuming limited resources replaced by consumption frenzy; in other words the “reality terror”. Up to what extent are we expecting this to go on? Will we be able to remove the masks of this “reality terror”?

“Reality terror” is a mask that hides the fading away of our differences and our dream of a another world under some so-called discourses of diversity and pluralism starting to be mentioned more and more frequently each day. “reality terror” is a tyranny of the majority, it is an apparatus we can call the “society–grinder”, it’s a routine, it is a apathetical polyphony. It is an imposition to familiarize us to pain, silence, lies, helplessness, a reflex to go with the crowd. With each passing day, our lives are becoming more and more ordinary, vulgar, similar.

Well then, is it possible in the midst of this darkness, to create a zone for radical subjectivity and new collectivities arising from within; are new autonomic and auratic spaces still possible? How will independent art-life practices be experienced apart from market, media conditions and political power?

Pierre Naville made a call to surrealists and communists in the 1930s to organize pessimism. Yet a contemporary graffiti in Bogota summarizes the point Zeitgeist has come to reside nowadays: let’s save pessimism for better days!

“Reality terror”; with the poetic destructive/subversive touch of contemporary art practices, is inviting you to question your beliefs, feel an estrangement for the world we live in and assume to be for real, and despite all its bitterness asks you to unveil new realities, new possibilities, other alternative worlds.

The triggering of a new language, aesthetics and even an evolution for a new conscience, for a new human being; the politics of mutation!

On behalf of Periferi Kolektif (Periphery Collective)
Alper T. Ince & Rafet Arslan
July/October 2011

Translated by: Tuna Poyrazoglu