Democracy & Art, the New World Academy and the Out-of-Place Space of the Inexistent

Abstract

Jonas Staal (1981) is a Dutch artist working within a space where art, politics and ideology get related. New World Academy (NWA) 2013-2015, is a work developed in conjunction with BAK. I claim that Staal works from within the topological concept of the Inexistent, which operates an out-of-place space. I use the concept of the Inexistent coined by French philosopher Alain Badiou (2012): “We shall then say that a change of world is real when an inexistent of the world starts to exist in this same world with maximum intensity.” What Staal operates is an excess within the core of the ideological project of Democracy. And here art exposes its radical educational turn, which means that art becomes an action subtracted from the operational rhythm of economy and politics, inaugurating an out-of- place space, where the invisible becomes existent. In New World Academy #2: Collective Struggle of Refugees. Lost In between Together, produced by the Refugee Collective We Are Here, we are confronted by a procedure of affirmative existence within conditions of negation and prohibition. This eruption is produced by and through the dispositive composed by Staal’s work. Is it art the only mechanism able to render what has been banned in contemporary Western societies? What is this out-of-place space of the inexistent that Art seems to open? And in what sense can be considered this out-of-place space an endurance project for political struggle of those inexistents?

Becas Chile CONICYT