Cartographilion

🟢 Dance around microfilm of discourse

Microfilm Discourse Dance • 1 second of becoming human • 1979 • Prijepolje, Yugoslavia

A dance spiral of interpelation into Yugoslav subject, until privatization darkens the age. But the map continues.

In this video, you see three microfilm examples, small maps, each with their own set of film frames. These represent key contextualized events from specific town (Prijepolje, Yugoslavia, 1979), capturing distinct ideological peaks:

2013 as the peak of capitalism

1994 as the peak of nationalism

1979 as the peak of socialism

The purpose is to examine in the name of Who is What doing?, analyzing how actions and ideologies are framed within their historical moments.

This work was created on cartographilion.com, beginning in October 2023, though the earliest dances date back to 2020.

The dances conclude in an original spiral, symbolizing the moment of becoming within ideology, concept inspired by Louis Althusserćs theory of interpellation.

Interpellation Example: When police ask "Who are you?", your response reinforces your identity within that ideological framework, even if only for a single second.

The point is what you say it is-I am merely the catalyst for that point. I possess no inherent knowledge, I just read and contextualize my reading.

Abandon Rational Calculation (Enslavement)

Let us extinguish rational calculation, for it is enslavement. Instead of clinging to the superstitious affect of the past, we must invent the future through theory, new diagrams of organization of redistribution of power and resources, through understanding of materialist dialectics.

The Urgency for Serbia (and Its Bourgeoisie)

This is critically important for Serbia, particularly for its today bourgeoisie, of whom it can be said:

> "Blinding signifiers, which once stoked revolutionary affect, now survive in the general culture, that is, in dominant ideology. Meanwhile, affect is domesticated into universal forms of submission (patriotism, political culture, constitutional patriotism, Eurocentrism, Orientalism, racism).

In contrast, the proletarian revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past... but only from the future—from the future it itself produces: from theory." > — Močnik, Theory with Ideology

🟡 Process of unfolding 2013 microfilm

By chance, I tried to think about the aesthetic synthesis of a large amount of data and discovered something that most resembles a description of your diagram aesthetis. The working title I'm using is microfilm of discourse, through which I attempt to depict the interpellation of the subject into three distinct "peaks" of ideologies, using the concrete example of Prijepolje. First, I collected all the articles from the old issues of the newspaper Polimlje, then grouped them according to the concepts that represent "frames" to me. After that, I synthesized them into a vertical column and narrowed the space to obtain abstract, narrow formations that symbolize the form of a map. I did this for 1979, 1994, and 2013 (socialism, nationalism, and capitalism).

The microfilm of discourse represents a theoretical mapping on the micro level of the municipality of Prijepolje from 2013 to visually depict key "cadres" that build interpellation (Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses). It uses publicly available archives from https://digital.biblioteka-prijepolje.rs/. What do we gain from the microfilm? We gain synthesized knowledge that observes discourse as a clear form, and its form provokes conciseness that demands reading and research. By forming a unique form for each year or specific context (in this case, a specific environment), a reader who is a researcher of the context is sought, viewing the context as primary in analyzing society.

🟢 5 plateaus

In the discourse of ancient rhetoric, we could say that, in some way, automatically, without particular effort, we recognize the topos to which the expression with the preposition 'refers' and from which it draws its meaning. That topos is common, general, it is the locus communis, koinos topos. (...) The act of saying and understanding occurs in a non-problematic self-evidence." (Tri Teorije, Rastko Mocnik)

The most evident things are a problem because we have an obvious agreement around them (like not perceiving sounds above 20 kHz). The obvious is normalized, and based on it, we move, we become lawyers, we get employed, we reproduce, we make ourselves happy or miserable. For it to be accepted, it must be justified, which in turn legitimizes and legalizes it. What operates at such low frequencies is the concordance we call ideology. A hidden totalization that can only be dismantled and decoded by recovering the expelled concepts and rejecting their reduction. To be able to see it, we must build platforms on which we move and analyze the structural pillars to which our subjects are fixed. Sometimes by identities and other times by desires.

I present to you 5 planes that I have discovered, along with two periods of 50 years (1979/2013) which I called Microfilm of discourse (which I am preparing to present) and which provide an example of how we were called into this world.

I tried to map 5 topoi by reading Althusser and the commentaries of Rastko Mocnik, and discussing with @araujazz and Luis @pedaisgalegos, whom I called planes (plateaus), through which we walk with 2 microfilms of discourses from two different years in Yugoslavia and later in Serbia.

Technique

Projection on 6-meter-long canvas with a height of 1.80m.

Exhibition Description

The exhibition develops a discourse microfilm from three periods — 1979, 1994, and 2013 — based on which the ideological interpellation of the subject is analyzed along three distinct ideological directions, relative to the specific context of the municipality of Prijepolje, located on a tri-border area. Regarding the gallery space, the proposal is to use an existing wall rail, 609 cm in length, so that accompanying elements revealing parts of the map can be projected onto it. Technically, the author uses a laptop, projector, and speakers. Due to accommodation costs, the author can afford a 7-day stay in Belgrade. The idea is that the projection, revealing frames, occurs in a repetitive process, alternating frames that reveal one example frame from the map (detailed explanation in the appendix). This creates an assemblage of diagrams, photographs, sounds, and a rhizomatic search for modes of ideological formation and structure. For a detailed presentation, one representative frame from each year will be used. Each frame has its own panel that theoretically explains its components with media records, and each frame has a panel for the year covering the global, national, and local specific contexts. The display method is animated in After Effects and is in the final stages of refinement. This type of exhibition is based on readings of Louis Althusser, Rastko Močnik, and Rad Pantić, along with communication with Vladan Joler and Miško Šuvaković, who have assessed the work as very interesting in the field of post-conceptual practice.