Hard Facts in the Post-Truth Age
Life cycle of a certain object, a sketch.
On 18 April Ljubljana hosts the international Forum Urban Acupuncture. Thanks to KUD C3, we have the opportunity to speak about the Hard Facts project at the conference’s panel on Public Privateness. Here’s the outline of what we’re interested to discuss with the participants:
The post-truth tag brutally acknowledges our collective experience – the binary perception of the world. Ours or theirs? The facts don’t matter, the rhetoric allows lies. What we are fed with is definitely no truth, it’s the food to remain biased. What seems to be a fiercely dynamic process of democratic argumentation is, in fact, a static yet expensive theatre of preaching to the converted.
This is the context of the Hard Facts, a modest artistic research on DIY history-making that led us to Vienna, Ljubljana, Madrid and Rijeka. We were looking for people that keep a memento object in their private possession although they may not be collectors. The authorised experts and institutions (e.g. museums) more or less obviously mirror the post-truth reality. Therefore we tried to make visible the process of self-authorisation and public expression of private narratives through the memento objects. Such marginal narratives generate others and, as the artist Pedro Barateiro remarked, “one can more easily remember them but also one can more easily forget.”
We find this element crucial. Maybe splitting our lives and civilisation down to more vulnerable, less permanent chunks of history doesn’t necessarily make us end up in relativism?
Hard Facts 