PHANTASMAGORIAS OF HISTORY
[16-second art]

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“Phantasmagorias of History” records the act of touching and looking back at historical photographs. Usually they show large groups of people, mass protests and popular revolts that occurred at various historical crossroads when the course of events could have turned otherwise, like in 1938, 1968 or in 1989.

Sixteen-second-long synchopated movements attempt to capture the “butterfly effect” in history, that mysterious  shudder of the wings that resist determinism. They become haunted loops of conjectural history that preserve the scars of the photographic surface, its glare, shadows and folds, as if refracting the potentialities and errors of the medium without a single revelatory zoom. My “touching” intervention cannot salvage history but only to commemorate lost opportunities and to conjure up the ghosts of the future that could have been.

In most cases I chose images of unorchestrated mass protests, political revolt and social movement rather than the official demonstrations and photogenically restaged heroic revolutions that supposedly captured the spirit of history.  My phantasmagorias commemorate deviant spirits, not “manifest destinies.”
               

Part 1: History of "What If"
[one] - [two] - [three] - [four] - [five]

Part 2: Avant-Garde of Erasure
[one] - [two] - [three] - [four]

The word “phantasmagoria” was invented for the theater of optical illusions produced chiefly by means of the magic lantern or similar devices. One of the pioneers of phantasmagoria Etienne-Gaspar Robertson opened his spectacle in the Capuchine cloister in Paris in 1799 to a French audience haunted by the revolution and terror. Figures of Marat, Danton, Robespierre, Louis appeared as specters and skeletons at the Phantasmagoric shows.  The shows were a combination of mystification and demystification, of new technology and historical violence, of  haunting images and scientific explanations.    Throughout the nineteenth century phantasmagorias haunted artists and political thinkers offering many different “optics” and plots to deal with new experiences of modernization--from gothic romance to modernist allegory.  Karl Marx uses phantasmagoria to describe the farce of the Revolutions of the “Eighteen Brumaire” and the policies of Louis-Bonaparte. Marx’s phantastmagoria evokes a gothic novel or a mystery play of the “world-historical conjuring of the ghosts of the dead. ” The figure for  phantasmagoria in Marx is the urban crowd that for him is a great dissimulator. It is a space where classes mix and where spontaneous and unpredictable  associations beyond class struggle can emerge. Phantasmagoria in Marx is used negatively as a model of distorted perception, the “smoke and mirrors” behind which one can find the real and the undistorted.

For the poet Charles Baudelaire, fanstasmagoria is no longer a bad word. It is constitutive of  the experience of modern urban life cannot be merely unveiled and abolished . The experience of urban phantasmagoria demands new plots of prose poems, experimental essays, chance encounters with unpredictable outcome  Phantasmagoria contributes to the atmosphere of human liberty and cannot be completely destroyed for the sake of future liberation.

This debates on theatricality and phantasmagoria is  echoed a century later in Theodor Adorno’s correspondence with Walter Benjamin where he accuses Benjamin of becoming a phantasmagoric writer Phantasmagoria for Adorno is once again the enemy of the revolutionary spirit that has to be exterminated:”A profound and thourough liquidation of phantasmagoria can succeed only if it is conceived as an objective category of the philosophy of history”

For Benjamin phantasmagoria is an integral part of  the dialectical image through which the past manifests itself in the present. Fantasmagoric ambivalence is  a way of cohabiting or even co-creating with the ghosts of the past and technologies of the present without predictable plots of gothic romance or ahistorical epic. Fantasmagoric ambivalence is not a subjective fancy but a part of the  phenomenology of modern experience that cannot be exorcised entirely.

Hannah Arendt describes the experience of freedom as a miracle of infinite improbability that occurs in public realm often at the moment of collective performance that can change history. Experience of public freedom is “our forgotten heritage” often written out of histories because it doesn’t always end in a victorious outcome.  
At the end, phantasmagoria is not an obstacle for the everyday arts of freedom but its manifestation; it opens up non-linear potentialities of action and imagination by allowing us to recognize rather than exorcize our inner strangers and engage with history in a non-deterministic manner.