encoding silence and performative resistance
Some notes from my short time at Transmediale Festival 2024
This years Transmediale collapsed under concerns of political interference and censorship of artists and culture wanting to defend their right to express pro-Palestinian sentiment. Many, many artists felt they could not take part in a (partly) state funded event when Berlin Senate had entertained legislative measures to create an ‘anti-discrimination clause’ that stated to make a clause that funded art organisations would have to sign and follow to receive state funding.1 There was widespread concern from cultural community that the anti-discrimination clause’s definition as determined by International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) would criticise opposition to the state of Israel and consequently censor expressions of solidarity with Palestinian people. The team at Transmediale put out a statement the week before the event explaining the political cultural tensions around this issue (and calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire) but as the event got underway many of the events cascaded with withdrawals and last minute refusals to participate as artists felt unsure about the conditions of political censorship they were entering into. This inevitably meant the festival was continually navigating looming censorship and cultural sensitives by avoiding direct words, images or direct addresses of support and solidarity with the Palestinian people, and the practice of one’s ability to circumvent, self-censor and communicate political meaning in this tense cultural landscape became the praxis of event.
This years edition was titled ‘You’re doing great Sweetie’ and the intended curatorial focus was meant to be on cuteness and the performativity of superficiality in online visual culture. Noura Tafeche and Alex Quicho’s presentation lecture ‘She’s evil, most definitely subminimal’ took the viewer on a disturbing tour of ‘#girltok’ influencer culture that mapped the hidden ideologies encoded into different cultures from the sexualisation of the girls in Otaku anime culture to contemporary dancing female Israeli military soldiers. Quicho and Tafeche highlighted the soft power operations that are being performed in these different memes and how meme culture such as ‘#dancing isreali female soliders’ videos operate as expansive propaganda for the military entertainment complex. Distributing ideology though hidden or concealed imagery is a strategy of information warfare that can be tactically deployed to ensure the content is ‘algo-friendly’ and will reach the maximum amount of eyeballs without being flagged or removed by content moderation platforms. These strategies shown as part of this performance explored how individuals can widely disseminate hate speech through social media and use performed encoded symbols, actions or rituals to circumvent platform censorship algorithms and hide violent ideologies ‘in plain sight’.
Another session that addressed the choreographies of censorship was Winnie Soon in conversation with Rachel O’Dwyer. Winnie’s recent ongoing project The Poetics of Unerasable Characters tracks and archives and publishes posts that have been removed from the Chinese social media platform Weibo (presumably by state officials or on their behalf). Winnie cited the White Paper Protest movement as inspiration for the project and talked both openly and indirectly about how they are continually practicing and performing ‘self censorship’ to navigate shifting terrains of surveillances. As part of the session Winnie created a publication of silence with the audience by handing out blank sheets of paper and inviting people to reflect for a moment in silence before collecting all the pieces of (still) blank paper and binding them into a published book, profoundly recording the silence into a bound object. The white paper movement was intensely relevant and quietly spoke to the resistance strategies of public organised initiatives such as ‘Strike Germany’ and the ‘archive of silence’ that document and make visible the increasing intervention of the state in silencing and suppressing pro Palestine voices in Germany and German funded culture. This action opened the festival and was a pre-cursor to the rest of the weekend as more and more artists withdrew, cancelled panels, or continued to participate and delicately navigated the tense environment through encoded symbolic references and performative gestures towards the war on Palestine.
How artists and visitors approached the withdrawal & refusal and the performative (act of) absence (and it’s spectacle of cancellation) became Transmediale 2024. When discussing the hidden subversive messages on tiktok, Quicho & Tafeche said that ‘the longer an idea can go unnoticed, the more viral it can become’. Concealment of ideology within content and media’s plasticity to convey multiple (often layered and contradictory) subversive meanings was a running theme for the weekend. The sessions that did go ahead indirectly addressed the censorship through negotiated exercises of performed symbolic resistance such as Winnie’s were poignant, moving and distressing. There was other parts of the program I enjoyed (Georgina Voss, Alexa Quicho and Rachel O’Dwyer persuading the whole crowd to Meow to popular cat meme was a brief moment of light comic reflief see image above).
I left on Sunday thinking about what media and messages are able to circulate and spin meaning in various communication landscapes and what strategies are individuals starting to having to ‘apply’ to conceal different political ideologies in these current times of increasingly censored and contested politics in culture? Concealing ideas and ideology (in both propaganda and resistance) was a prominent theme of that emerged over the weekend and I have respect for all artists (both who participated and withdrew) and the organisers for navigating this particularly tense edition of Transmediale. By the last day of the festival at HKW a hundred thousand strong march was taking place with people streaming across central Berlin to demonstrate against the far right fascists - Alternative for Deutschland (AFD). Accessing the building was difficulty with such large numbers demonstrating outside and with all the tense atmosphere around suppressed voices and artist withdrawals, I no longer had the patience or energy to circumvent the political landscape that the festival was struggling to navigate as the noise outside became too loud to ignore.
On January 22, the Berlin Senate confirmed that the clause will be suspended and will not be applied due to both legal and cultural criticism with Joe Chialo, Berlin’s culture senator, going on to say “Let there be no doubt: I will continue to fight for a Berlin cultural scene that is free of discrimination”. (source)