Oliver Ressler will be the featured artist of this edition of Transeuropa Festival with his video-installation “What is democracy?”. The work will be present in all Festival cities and accompanied by discussions on the themes of the video.

About the project

“What is democracy?” is not one question, but is actually two questions. On the one hand, the question relates to conditions of the current, parliamentary representative democracies that are scrutinized critically in this project. On the other hand, the question traces different approaches to what a more democratic system might look like and which organizational forms it could take.

The project asked “What is democracy?” to numerous activists, migrants and political analysts in 18 cities around the world. This pool of interviews builds the basis for eight videos, which are presented in a multi-channel video installation.

This installation (re)presents a kind of global analysis about the deep political crises of the Western democratic model. In one video, Adam Ostolski (Warsaw) explains that originally “the modern idea of democracy was connected to the notion of progress” and parliamentary states “had some tendency to become more and more democratic by including new types of political actors, such as workers and women. […] But since the 1980s, since the neoliberal trend in politics and economy we have a regression of democracy.” Lize Mogel (New York) notes that situation changed in such a way, that when you think about representative democracy today “you are not necessarily talking about individuals being represented, but
more capital being represented.”

While some subjects in the videos elaborate their ideas of direct democracy or decisionmaking processes of indigenous communities, David McNeill (Sydney) raises the issue of whether it makes sense “to continue contesting for the right to own and define the term democracy” or whether “it has been so corrupted and polluted by the conservatives that claimed ownership of it, that it is better to be surrendered.”

The 8-channel video installation discusses the contested notion of “democracy”, which is misused for the maintenance of order by those in power, while at the same time “democracy” still represents an ideal hundreds of million people in the South desperately want to achieve. Today it seems almost impossible to be against “democracy”, even though it is getting emptier and emptier. A potential strategy could try to fill what is called “democracy” with new meaning. In this sense, the installation presents a multi-layered discourse on democracy, which expresses a broad field of opinions that go beyond the borders of nation-states and continents.

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