Descripción de la Exposición
To give an example, feminist slogans such as “The future is female”, “Don’t underestimate the power of a woman” and “We should all be feminists” have increasingly permeated the public realm through global fashion companies ranging from Topshop, Asos, Monki and Dior, the latter advocating this motto on a €620 T-shirt. Dedicated website sections of these brands propagate wokeness, awareness-raising and self-empowerment, prominently stating to reserve parts of the sales revenue to, for instance, the betterment of labour conditions for women and planned parenthood. Another Monki item states “Choose Peace”, but in judging the label “Made in Bangladesh” we may come to feel that the notion of displaying wokeness through consumption often comes at a double price.
The importance of engaging in acts of consciousness raising in aiming to enact social justice, to mobilise a radical aspiration towards freedom and equality indeed seems increasingly important in a world that continues to be ridden with binaries and ongoing polarisations between dominant socio-political orders. However, what is to be done if those acts are simultaneously indexed on the vectors of advanced capitalism? Or when counter movements are overcome by internal conflict and forms of performing activism, in which spokespeople of a certain agenda engage in discussions solely reprimanding other critics and activists for their stances—this and that person just got cancelled! What forms of response and resistance can be formulated when ideologies have become trendy and woke-washing brands cash in on social justice, whilst hiding behind transparent and opportunistic but not less powerful facades of corporate social responsibility?
In other words still, in paraphrasing philosopher Rosi Braidotti, […] Advanced capitalism has sucked in, assimilated, transformed and subsumed the very subjects that should have been or were expected to be the vectors of difference. […] we have differing as processes, disengaged from the revolutionary political subjects that were supposed to be the transformative and disruptive moment, whereas now we have feminism without women as political agency, racism without races, ecology without nature. This has lead to an internal schizophrenia in which a disengagement from the processes of coding and recoding from the empirical referents, the political subjects that used to carry these agendas and were supposed to be the historical agents of change have now become encapsulated by a system in which differences are capitalised upon.[1]
Exposición. 13 dic de 2024 - 04 may de 2025 / CAAC - Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo / Sevilla, España
Formación. 01 oct de 2024 - 04 abr de 2025 / PHotoEspaña / Madrid, España
