Marta de Gonzalo & Publio Pérez Prieto

Before this, the future was already here, the one of a designed restoration of inequality as the standard and as only possible horizon. No one can continue to pretend that they weren’t seeing it. This inequality showed itself in our experiences, our emotions, in all of the screens with the omnipresence of its radical and violent transparency. 

In 2012, in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis and its effects on all our lives, we composed a folk tune and activated our anger in a series of pencil drawings. We were asking ourselves at that time too what art we needed to do in order to face the new no future/no alternative imposed discourse.  We found in both our national art tradition in Goya's drawings, and in traditional popular songs a use of irony and humor in which a series of virtues conveyed: the use of accessible tools, at hand to everyone, the use of poetics, the ability of taunt to break the stability of power and the strong collective power of doing together. We wanted to make some serious stupid art or some little stupid art be pretty serious, and we wanted to invite everyone to do it as well.

This helped us to find the way to resist and continue to enjoy doing art under a devastated cultural landscape. We recover today the anonymous main character of our video and place it in our near future.

Still, today as then, arts will need to survive the great economical damages of this crisis, the already precarious artists will need to imagine new solidarities of mutual support. Today as then we will need to find a way of expanding and spreading the cultural creation of alternative imaginaries of future. Today as then we will need to find ways of collective resistance and critical action. Today as then, we will need to state that this given fate isn’t all that we can aim to live. 

The historical reality of the pandemic has undoubtedly driven us to a radical experience in a personal, social and global level. We balance and judge the situation as we ride it and try to fit in it, while at the same time both experience and reality change and change us irremediably. This exceptional time can give us a chance to glimpse a new vitalism with micro and macropolitic derives where there still must be space for complex and collective happiness, for a different image and significant words.