Aesthetics of Resistance

The book as an outcome of Jacobi's artistic research provides an understanding of the aesthetic language that emerges from these events. Building on how the uprisings on Tahrir Square led into the global wave of protests in 2011/2012 (like Occupy Wall Street in USA, M15 in Spain, Gezi Park in Istanbul) and how against this background an aesthetics of resistance articulates how politics of consent are reconstituted through performative acts. Even when these are resituated into complex, democratic, and mediatized fronts to challenge power.

Terms like Active Time, Aesthetics, Another World, Apotheosis of Revolt, Barricades, Black Bloc, Cloning, Collective Body, Constructed Situation, Dead Time, Eros Effect, Exodus, Headless, Kettle, Militant, Multitext, Policing, Resonance, Sci-Fi Warriors, Sense-Event, Temporary Autonomous Zone, Transcendence, Troublemakers, Turmoil, Verfremdung and Violence are explored both as discursive themes and as aesthetic tools in the scripts and performances collected or performed by Jacobi and others.

Referring to German writer Peter Weiss's seminal novel "Aesthetics of Resistance", artist Hito Steyerl writes in her essay "Aesthetics of Resistance?" that the novel "... establishes a genealogy of aesthetic research, which is related to the history of emancipatory struggles throughout the 20th century." Taking up the title "Aesthetics of Resistance", Jacobi explicitly connects his project to this "genealogy of aesthetic research", articulating how contemporary political activism performs radical, political imagery grounded in collective improvisation and an inventive, contextual consciousness.

The political content is constituted as form and is performed as image. This is - in an extremely condensed form - the "Aesthetics of Resistance".

Frans Jacobi (b. 1960) is a visual artist, living and working in Copenhagen and Bergen. He works with performance, text and images, and since 2012 has been Professor in Time-based Art at the Faculty of Art, Music & Design / KMD, University of Bergen, Norway. In 2014 Jacobi established the artistic research conglomerate SYNSMASKINEN and in 2017 the Green Hijab Movement with visual artist Gitte Sætre.