ANATOMY OF POLITICAL MELANCHOLY ATHENS CONSERVATOIRE ANATOMY OF POLITICAL MELANCHOLY CURATOR’S TEXT 2 ARTISTS KATERINA APOSTOLIDOU 12 MARC BAUER 16 SARA SEJIN CHANG 20 MARIANNA CHRISTOFIDES 24 DEPRESSION ERA 28 EIRENE EFSTATHIOU 32 MARINA GIOTI 36 JAN PETER HAMMER 40 SVEN JOHNE 44 YORGOS KARAILIAS 48 SPIROS KOKKONIS 52 ARIANE LOZE 56 ADRIAN MELIS 60 TOM MOLLOY 64 DIMITRIS MYTAS 68 JENNIFER NELSON 72 YORGOS PRINOS 76 CHRYSA ROMANOS 80 HANS ROSENSTRÖM 84 GEORGES SALAMEH 88 NESTORI SYRJÄLÄ 92 THU VAN TRAN 96 DIMITRIS TSOUMPLEKAS 100 BRAM VAN MEERVELDE 104 EDUCATION PROGRAMME 108 ABOUT THE SCHWARZ FOUNDATION ABOUT THE ATHENS CONSERVATOIRE 110 COLOPHON 112 Katerina Gregos / Curator ANATOMY OF POLITICAL MELANCHOLY “Change happens when we decide - what we want, rather than what we think we might get.”1 1 — George Monbiot What has happened to the state of contemporary politics? Wasn’t there once a time when politicians were driven primarily by unselfish - motives or altruistic intentions and entered politics to serve the public good — a time when politicians - were well-educated people, bound by moral integrity and high ideals? True, politics has always been - prone to corruption and the abuse of power, but in recent years it seems that self-serving private interests — or the interests of industry and business — have come to take precedence over the inter- ests of the wider electorate. - Citizens, it seems, exist only to be 2 managed, manipulated and - exploited, rather than served. - Political campaigns deliver mes- - sages of fear, rather than of hope or vision; scandals abound and mis- creants offer apologies without sin- - cerity and then quickly return to - ‘business as usual’. Voting is no longer about positive choice, but about accepting the lesser of two evils. No wonder that fewer and fewer people are turning out to - vote, while many of those who still do are disaffected. Moreover, many voters have been abandoning traditional main- stream parties while an ever-in- creasing group of people don’t identify with a specific party. As sociologist Stephanie L. Mudge - points out, “electorally, the ‘losers’ of ‘globalisation’ — that is, a whole 2 lot of people, including whole com- munities — ended up with no party that spoke for them2. In her excel- lent interview Neoliberalism from the Left she also discusses the cur- rent shift to the Right and how - these parties pretend to be repre- - sentatives of the disempowered and the disenfranchised; the most telling example of this of course, being Trump’s electoral victory in - 2016. However, she goes yet further to critique the Left for creating a political vacuum. She talks about one of the failures of the Left as being the espousal of “Third Way” - politics from the 1990s onwards; - i.e. embracing the politics of the free market, privatization and finan- - cialization more and more, while increasingly relinquishing the idea of the welfare state (one obvious example of this would be Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’). “Culturally”, she suggests, “criticism of the neo-liberal order was marginalized 3 and hived off as a province of the - ‘radical’ left, rather than being the stuff of mainstream political dis- course — where it should have been all along”.3 - To make matters worst, we are increasingly witnesses to 3 the debasement of political lan- 1. George Monbiot, Our democracy is broken, debased and distrusted — but there are ways to fix it, The Guardian, 25th January 2017. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/ jan/25/democracy-broken-distrusted-trump-brexit-politi- cal-system?CMP=fb_gu&fbclid=IwAR2RMtUgC6MYhmUU- TygcMrAUGHRVIwg576w1ar-p-HVp_zrLr7fAV1Lh7DA 2. Neoliberalism From the Left: An Interview with Stephanie L. Mudge https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/left-political-par- ty-economists-neoliberalims-keynesianism 3. Ibid EN GR guage; the infantilisation and polar- - isation of political debate; the growth of a simplified discourse that panders to collective fears rather than addressing the real, pressing questions; the lack of accountability from politicians, and of course, ‘fake truth’ and ‘alterna- - tive facts’. Welcome then to the heyday of ‘psychopolitics’ — the interaction between politics or - political phenomena and human psychology. With Trump in the White House, Putin in the Kremlin, and Bolsonaro in the Brazilian National Congress psychopolitics has taken on a new, frightening, - meaning. No wonder so many of us - feel disillusioned. Philosopher 4 Lieven de Cauter calls this sense of disillusionment ‘political melan- - choly’: a sinking feeling borne from frustration, anger, despair, mistrust, sadness and hopelessness. This - exhibition is inspired by his text Small Anatomy of Political Melancholy.4 The disillusionment - with politics, government, state institutions and political parties is at an all-time high. For the first time - since World War II (which was preceded by similar political crises - of the 1920s and 1930s), we have reason to fear the disintegration of peace and the rise of aggressive nationalism. Clearly there is something pro- foundly wrong with contemporary - politics: it is not only a case of the moral and intellectual inadequacy - of politicians, but also the gaping - chasm between the aims of politi- cians and the needs of citizens. The foundations of democracy itself are at risk, not only from the rise of 4 demagogic populism in Europe, but also from the grip of financial insti- tutions, mega-corporations and - special interest groups which have the power to influence the political agenda. Politics, it seems, has become - hostage either to opportunists or to - people of power and special inter- - est groups. The education, culture, motives, capabilities and moral - standing of politicians don’t appear to bear much weight today. Greece, - of course, exemplifies the loss of sovereignty due to debt, where ordinary citizens have been forced to bail out a country driven to finan- cial collapse by government mis- - management and corruption of the political system (this is also due to the age-old clientelist relationship between state and citizens in the country). The longstanding eco- - nomic and political crisis in Greece has led to political disillusionment, - mistrust of institutions, a sense of collective powerlessness, and a post-ideological phase character- ised by apathy, individualism, and - resignation. According to sociolo- gist of law Ioannis Kampourakis: “This defeatism fits into a longer - trend in Greece, tracing back to the defeat of the communist left after - the post-WWII Civil War, of nostal- gia and glorification of a ‘struggle - fought, even if lost’, which has aes- theticised the contemporary apathy - as a form of political pessimism and melancholy”.5 In the case of Greece, and other European countries bound by aus- terity politics, political melancholy is also inextricably tied to what has been called ‘financial melancholy’. In a recent study by the Goldsmiths - College Political Economy - Research Centre, entitled Financial Melancholia: Mental Health and Indebtedness, Professors Dr. William Davies, Dr. Johnna Montgomerie and Sara Wallin point - out that, “the rise of mental health problems such as depression can- not be understood in narrowly med- - 5 ical terms, but instead needs to be understood in its political-eco- nomic context. An economy driven - by debt (and prone to problem debt 4. Lieven de Cauter, Small Anatomy of Political Melancholy http://crisiscritique.org/special09/cauter.pdf 5. Ioannis Kampourakis, Political disillusionment in Greece: toward a post-political state? https://www.opendemocracy. net/can-europe-make-it/ioannis-kampourakis/political-disillu- sionment-in-greece-toward-post-political-state EN GR at the level of households) will have a predisposition towards rising rates of depression”6. Their study 8- on ‘financial melancholia’ demon- strates “the influence of inequality - on rising levels of household debt and depression”7 and “foregrounds the narratives of the indebted to interpret how being trapped by past - debts through present-day repay- - ment obligations manifests as psy- - chological and sociological prob- lems of indebtedness”.8 In many - European households it is now - widely acknowledged that, “house- - hold debt overhang cultivated dur- ing the boom years generates a persistent drag on economic renewal”9. To highlight the scale of - the problem of indebtedness, they cite figures, which show that there is now three times more debt in the UK and the US since the 1990s. - They also point out how “individual obligations to creditors rise as - state obligations to citizens fall”10 - and how the “combination of 11 finance-led growth with withdrawal of services and income support from central and local governments - to low-income households has led to households at the lower end of - the income distribution relying - most heavily on private debt to - replace public welfare”11. Their research shows, how credit does 12 not offer a way of getting ahead in - life but traps people in a vicious cycle of debt and how the ‘capillary power’ of debt, “that is, its capacity 13 to invade intimate relationships in - the family, community and one’s - own body” has devastating - effects.12 Finally, it points out how “collective and individual agency - 6 are constrained,