BOGOTA CHANGE As mayor of Bogota, during official political meetings Antanas Mockus proudly wore a bullet-proof jacket with a big heart cut out of it. In the mid-1990s, in a Colombian aura of hostility, bloodshed, and narco-traf- fic, he initiated a nonviolent, performative politics of images and ges- tures: places where arms could be exchanged for toys, a night out for women only, traffic directed by mimes penings in and out of empty graves to His program Cultura Ciudadana (Culture of Ci tally shifted the paradigm for making and experiencing politics in Lat- in America towards a civic self-education method based on play and staged situations. Mockus employed an art-driyen imaginary to sus- pend »business as usual« in order to destabilize rational discourse, arm hate speech and bureaucratic rule, and to bring about an under- standing of emergence, multitude, and community. His mayoral term was later called the »Bogot change.« As the son of a sculptor, and himself a philosopher, mathematician, and former university dean, Mockus smuggled an art agenda into politics, seeking inspiring content not in church but in an exhibition: »When I am trapped, | try to do what an 158 FORGET FEARartist would do.« Artists often claim not to look to their interests but to the totality of society and its well-being. Mockus borrowed from art- ists the concept of lobbying for lost causes and dispensation from ob- serving norms. He pushed artistic questioning of the status quo in the direction of social experiment and a new type of political practice. Together with the historian Jorge Orlando Melo, he founded a li- brary program in violent districts of Bogoté. When people wanted to take out a book, librarians handed over the volumes with one remark: >We trust you to return it.« In the midst of crime and poverty librar- ies became zones of safety and social reliance. Some intellectuals saw his politics as leftist populism, jocular leadership, or self-proclaimed moral authority. But his mode of curating a city was to produce what art is often intended to produce: a re-contextualization and under- standing of both individual and common agendas. On a TV talk show during his last presidential campaign in 2010, just after he was diag- nosed with Parkinson’s disease, he was asked to take a seat in a large wooden chair. He refused, thus leaving »an empty throne,« manifesting his wish that the leader’s chair be vacant, and that executive power in fact lies in our hands if only we want it to. Mockus was a guest of the Berlin Biennale in July 2011. We visited the based in Berlin show at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. There he stopped for a while in front of a portrait of Klaus Wowereit by Clegg & Guttman.' Looking at Mockus observing the faint smile of Berlin’s Governing Mayor, I thought to myself that what European parliaments could learn from the »Bogota change« was an under- standing of polities which includes art in a serious and non-decora- tive manner. For Mockus, artists were never puzzles in the showcase of a Leistungsschau, a mere decoration or tourist attraction, or good company at European, or even Vatican, salons. He saw artis ners in think-and-do tanks engaged in the process of organi in turning the dirty game of personal interests into passionate po- ical action. It is not too much to say that Antanas Mockus is one of the few politicians who seeks an electorate among culture producers, who inspires them as he inspired us, and who believes in the power of art. In this regard he is an artist himself. FoRoer rear 159a YOUTH OF AA SPEECH by FERNANDO VALLEJO from THE MOVIE THE SUPREME UNEASINESS: INCESSANT PORTRAIT OF FERNANDO VALLEJO (LA DESAZON SUPREMA: RETRATO INCESANTE DE FERNANDO VALLEJO), 2003, by LUIS OSPINA3 2 i Dear youth of Colombia: You have been unlucky enough to be born, and in the craziest coun- try in the world. Do not follow its path, do not be dragged by its sanity. For insanity may lighten the burden of life as it may build up unhappiness. Heaven and happiness do not exist. That’s your parents’ alibi to jus- tify having brought you into this world, What exists is reality, the tough reality. The slaughterhouse we all came to die at if not to kill at and meanwhile eat the animals. Thus, do not reproduce. Do not repeat the crimes committed on you. Do not give back the same evil, paid with evil, as imposing life is the ultimate crime. Do not disturb the unborn. Let them be in the peace of nothingness. Anyway we'll all eventually go back there. So why beat about the bush? The country you got by chance, that we all got by chance, is a bank- rupt country on the run. Lame ruins of what once was. Thousands of FORGET FEAR 181kidnaps, thousands and thousands of murders, millions of unemployed workers, millions of people exiled, millions of people displaced, the country in ruins, the industry in ruins, the judicial system in ruins, a disrupted future, that’s what you got. I pity you. You got it worse than Idid. And just like me, that once had to leave, and that’s why I’m ad- dressing you alive, as far as I know you will probably have to leave, too, but you won't be welcome anywhere, for we're not wanted nor needed anywhere. A Colombian passport at an international airport causes terror. »Who’s that?« »Why are they here?« >What do they bring?« »Perhaps cocaine?« »Will they stay?« No. We're not in this world to stay. We're here to pass like the wind and die. Sometimes that wind causes devastation and has a name of its own: it is Pablo Escobar, it is Miguel Rodriguez. Orejuela. It is Carlos Castaiio, it is Tirofijo, it is Gaviria, it is Samper, it is Pastrana. Learn, as you leave, to name infamy properly. When I was born I found a war between liberals and conservatives that destroyed the country and killed thousands. That war goes on but the parties have changed. All against all and nobody knows who the murderers are any more. No one knows, no one cares, no one will find out. Why? What for? Anyway, the murderers will not be punished in the land of impunity. Our president goes on pilgrimage to the low- lands to embrace our greatest criminal, like telling them with the in equity of that embrace, »Kill, steal, extort, destroy, kidnap! But .. Do it thoroughly and keep what’s left of Colombia!« I’ve had a tough life and, may I say, it will be the same for you. And one day I had to leave, unwillingly and, may I say, it will be the same for you. The fate of us Colombians is to leave. Of course, if we're not killed first. And those who make it, do not think you've left, for Colombia will haunt you everywhere. It will haunt you as it has haunted me day and night wherever I’ve been to. Some moment of ethereal joy you've had here, not repeatable elsewhere, will follow you until you die. ‘Text courtesy of Luis Osp Fernando Vallejo. 182 FORGET FEAR vitor 40 #404 aH OLYL a a LN | ahd Ld ANTANAS MOCKUS in CONVERSATIONJW: As mayor of Bogotd, you conducted effective politics with the method often tused by the artist: suspending the rules of the everyday, revealing the hidden ‘agendas or interdependence of structures. ‘AM: Art was helpful in opening up what I would call »new ways of doing poli- tics,« When I was elected mayor of Bogoti in 1993, we started to implement a ‘number of »artistically driven actions which would visualize our goals. Being a long-term university teacher, I believed that the community has to understand and pursue its common interests, and realize its ability both to lose and gain some- thing. That was the aim of our program Culture of Citizenship (Cultura Ciu- dadana), We stared to introduce games and symbols for the citizens of Bogotd to ‘understand themselves with asa part of a larger community. One of our actions, for example, dealt with violence and murders. It was held at the communal cemetery, ‘and focused on the very significant drop inthe city’s homicide rate from one year tw the next. We launched a powerful campaign saying that life is sacred, and that taking someone's life for a phone or acar is absurd and pointless. Having your car stolen isn't funny, but many people in Latin America stil kill fora car ora mobile phone. The program was called Life is Sacred (La vida es sacrada) and ted to 2 near fifty-percent reduction in the murder rate, a figure that no statistics would hhave found realistic or possible. We decided to visualize how many lives were saved the previous year. Taking advantage of the fact that the cemetery was par tially empty, on the holiday of the Day of the Dead I invited five hundred peo: ple—equivalent to the number of survivors—and asked them to step inside the ‘empty erypts. When they leapt out of the tombs, it served as evidence of all the lives saved. The slogan that came out of this was »Let’s keep those graves emp- 'y.« Amtstc acts are not so far removed from acts of violence. Almost every form of violence has @ symbolic component, because the perpetrators aim to stir emo- tions in order to produce meaning. | understood that one can achieve the same results without causing physical harm. That was the idea behind the Culture of Citizenship. Its goals were to improve society through education and art. We de- fined Cultura Ciudadana as a cultural regulation of citizens’ behavior. And though self-control was an important element, the main emphasis was on mutual support asa way towards consistency, We wanted to achieve this via a number of steps: increasing the number of law-abiding citizens, increasing their capacity and will to influence each other through law-abiding behavior, and fostering communica- tion and the potential for expression. Violence is in part a result of a communiea- tions breakdown, so improving contact between people i areal solution, Another major issue was the number of firearms in Bogots, especially in the slums and poor neighborhoods. To fight the problem we launched a program in which we ‘offered to exchange guns for gifts, and toy guns for different kinds of toys. The kids would come and exchange them every now and then. And surprisingly, the program, being initially more of a symbolic act, proved extremely successful in the long run. Violence, the worst of plagues in Latin America, was dismantled by joy. Still another effective action was connected with water shortages. Bogota needed to drastically save on water. I decided to appear on TV while taking a shower and turning off the water, asking Colombian citizens to do the same. In just two months people started to use less water, and water usage is now forty percent lower than before the insuffciencies. What did you need art for? ‘Well, one French mode of the sociology of art, as represented by Pierre Bourdieu, claims that artis only what enters the museum. A professor at the NationalUniversity in Medellin had a litle bird, which he brought to an art museum and pputon a table. For several hours this bird was in the museum, transformed into art. It was something of a challenge to Bourdieu’s thesis. I'm the son of a sculptress, so I was educated fo understand art in a really broader sense: as a way of saying and dealing with what would be difficult to say in @ normal manner. My mother worked not only with ceramics or objects meant to hang on walls. She aso orga nized workshops in which she sought to bring out people's sincere reactions, hav- ing them act out their family relationships. A close friend made a small box with the inscription, »For the ashes of my mother when she dies.« It doesn’t fit the standard repertoire of interactions, My daughter made a 200 with a text that said, Animals are a lot cleaner than hummans.« But coming back to your question: Yes, 1 was smuggling art into polities and testing how we connect to formality. What are our codes of behavior; why do we respect limits to interaction? I think that art isa lot about making a certain order visible. Politics is also about order. I remem- ber a couple from Mexico asking, » What is your work about?« I said, »1 use art and politics ina playful ways Art for me isa very sophisticated alternative in the use of space and time. IFT proclaim the whole city of Bogoté a stage for a public spectacle for two weeks, as I did a couple of years ago, I ean produce an uncom: mon statement—something new coming from the perspective of suspension of judgment. With such gestures I tried to extend a sense of public spectacle which would involve real circumstances. As mayor I wasn't able (o, for example, intto- duce a ban on guns in general. But I could ban them during a football match. Just as [could ban guns for those two weeks when Bogotd was transformed into @ stage. So I tried to look at the whole eity from this perspective, and to include it inthe game. Doris Sommer, a lecturer at Harvard and the initiator ofa program of cultural agents.« had noticed that political gestures of this kind were consistent with Hannah Arendt’ idea of suspended judgment. In an action that forces us to stop and think, to suspend the usual, to withdraw, even momentarily from the driving forces of time, Sommer sees the force of a new political imagination, the possibility of an idea on which the public realm can be founded anew. A-curator is originally an overseer, a person in charge of a certain order, a per- son who cares but also controls. In this sense you were curating a city, Bogotd. Can this be a sustainable political strategy? Fora long time the »lace game,« using two strings connecting two people was for ‘me a useful metaphor for understanding the whole system. Normally, we're edu- cated to see the people, but one needs to learn to see the links. We're drinking ‘water during our conversation —now imagine it 2s a cocktail with only soda and ice. We could call ita theological cocktail, but we could just as well call it the proletarian cocktail because it’s cheap. Inthe lace game, each knot is built by such an approach. You can see the individuals or you can see the links between them, In order to check if you understood the solution properly there's the concept of reversibility, which isa way of positioning oneself in both situations, as part ofthe ‘community, strongly linked to the others, and as an individual. Feeling linked, one has a nostalgia for independence, and when you are free, there's a nostalgia for being dependent. To use the language of Emile Durkheim: we're living in a soci ty of organic solidarity, linked to 2 high division of labor, where everybody is performing their roles. What he calls organic solidarity comes from interdepen- «dence, specialization and complementarities between people in industrialized so- cieties. Although different individuals perform different tasks and might have different interests, the general order and solidarity of the society rests on theirreliance on each other.on the interdependence of the parts. Durkheim speaks also of a smechanical solidarity found in »traditional« societies, where integration stems from a sense of connection through common work, education. or religious rituals. Nevertheless, living in developed societies as we do, there are moments in Which one is able to experience short, intense episodes of that »mechanical and homogeneous solidarty.« These moments are known as uprisings and general strikes, time of shared experience of collective identity and creativity. They can be very beautiful, but also very dangerous. They can produce collective, progres sive ideas, ike the invention of Greek philosophy, the abolishment ofthe financial privileges of the Church during the French Revolution, the rise of Solidarity in Poland, or the events in Tahrir Square; but they can just as well produce ideolo- gies like Nazism. These moments cannot be brought back, but they could be intel- Tectally recuperated This is what contemporary art tries to do, to some extent. Some artists do it on the level of research. A Columbian artist, Clemencia Ech- ‘ever, in her video series Documentos de epoca (Documents of an Era), captures the essence of the collective experience of violence exerted by the paramilitary ‘guerrilla groups in the 1990s, We should work on how professional commun ties —such as syndicates, unions, or interest groups —can complement individual- ism, so that we might live connected and disconnected at the same time. I believe in the lace-game metaphor, where people are connected by bonds, and belong to ‘complex system, My job as mayor was to make these links visible. The day I ‘was elected dean of the University, got on a bike and I rode three laps around the building. Cycling for me was evidence of my independence. I had 1 prove to ‘myself that even if I have changed positions and I was going to be dealing with a huge system, I'm still able to move about by myself and be autonomous and. logical. Sometimes less is more. In his excellent book Ulysses Unbound, the Norwe- sian social and political theorist Jon Elster argues that having fewer options to choose from might actually be preferable. He argues why an individual might choose to limit his or her freedom of action citing examples from religious funda- mentalism to addiction. Elster noticed that in polities people mostly want to bind ‘others, not themselves. He also discusses the role of constraints in the creation of an artwork. Art for him isan individual and collective effort, where art itself imposes ‘number of productive constraints. My idea of an artist is someone who, finding himself in a prison cell takes a piece of chalk and draws a border in order to define his space. So it's a person who has even more restrictions than it might normally seem, But by defining these restrictions on his own, he’s able to liberate himself, Will art of the future just dissolve into society? [Artis very pretentious concept. It has the pretension of creating, not just repro- ducing, a certain language. There are two general approaches: producing art for art, which was often the case in late capitalism; or seeing it as a privileged lan- guage for changing society. I believe that you can retain the elitist concept of art at the same time be involved in a social experiment, using this elitist art to ‘wards achieving social goals. I ascribe extreme symbolic value to art. Instead of going to church, I personally goto an art museum to look for symbols which feed ‘me, Contact with art gives pleasure, but if [can’t share these symbols with others, [feet sad or stupid | eel that my role is to translate it into political work. I'd rather retain the preten sions of art and make them public. I's strange that society seems to value art alot roroervean 16]‘more than pedagogy. If you look at all the effort expended in the academic field, you quickly note that pedagogy is an amorphous, underestimated zone, while art sits atthe other extreme of the spectrum. Both disciplines share the same pleasure of understanding, teaching, and developing new meanings and possibilities. OF ‘course there are exceptions, like Finland, where a lot of effort goes into a better Understanding of the learning process in children, and involving the best teachers atthe earliest level of education. Even being noted, truthful, and lucid in peda- ‘gogy. one is still valued less than as an artist In your political practice, there's been a lot of what you call sub-arte a bullet- proof jacket with a heart cut into it, a Superman super-citizen costume,a plastic ‘sword serving as your political arm, or a vaccine against violence. If one were to build an exhibition out of those objects, i'd probably turn out to be pretty ped- agogie, or even naive. At the same time it does things with art; it’s performative, ‘One of the main ideas behind doing politics with art was the concept of recontex- ‘ualization, of making citizens see the system we're all part of, and taking respon- sibility for it. Artists claim that an image ora gesture says a lot more than written discourse. My work was also about images in society, engineering, or technology. used art forthe distribution of knowledge, which is a key element of contempo- rary society. Knowledge has an empowering potential and sets the rules. Once we know the rules, and are stimulated by art, humor, and creativity, we are much ‘more likely to accept change. I wanted to educate people with games, but it was also like playing with limits. The word »playings isin fat dangerous, because for most ofthe time its quite serious. ‘You were calling upon people to »commit art, not terrorism.« [believe that artis capable of producing the same results as a terrorist act, instill- ing an image in people's memory and imagination. But art is more productive in the affirmative sense. So when we were trying to mobilize people to protest ‘against violence and terrorist attacks, we invented a »vaccine against violences: the idea was to draw the face of a person who had hurt you. The images were {drawn on balloons, which people could then burst. The campaign involved around 50,000 participants, and was based on the concept of »symbolic violence.« I tried to demonstrate that expressing anger and personal confrontation can take differ. cent, more sophisticated forms. And it does not have to lead to violence, as itis often the case in Colombia and Latin America. Another important notion for me ‘was co-responsibilty. When I became mayor of Bogoté, many official positions in the city were handed out according to council members’ recommendations and political connections. I tried to stop that, and ended up being labeled as wan anti- patronage fundamentalist« This was the point where I presented a statement to a key council member, explaining our goals of transparency and standing up against nepotism, Af first he smiled, but later resigned. By making the situation more transparent I also wanted to challenge the condition of being dependent on indi- vidual leaders. It was important to develop collective leadership, I wouldn't like to be credited forall that we achieved. Millions of people contributed to it; that is the only reason why it worked out, I prefer a more egalitarian approach. I like to stimulate people to learn. When I decided to run as a candidate a mere four ‘months before the presidential elections in the autumn of 2010, I was told that I was heading for political suicide. I tried not to present myself as a leader. During the final campaign, I was invited to a TV studio and asked to sit in an antique ‘wooden chair. felt so ridiculous init that I lft it empty, asa sign that leadership3 2 3 ‘can be distributed among the people. I believe that culture and society can be ‘changed together with its citizens, not through manipulation. AI of my actions and their significance should be transparent. 1 was also a strong supporter ofthe theory of ingratitude, which basically boils down to the following: If you want my Philosophy, don’t expect private profit. That wasa trick to oppose to the contempt Which is often shown by politicians like Putin in Russia or Uribe in Colombia, ‘They create a public opportunism, because they transform polities into a struggle for profit. They manipulate, and in political manipulation ordinary citizens are never competent enough. I challenged this, saying: no private profits, and no ma- nipulation, 1 was even ready to radically discredit myself to make my politics ‘transparent How would you define polities, then? Politics isa recontextualisation of interests with the use of reason and emotions, ‘There is no polities without interests, Polities continuously veils and unveils them. But you can’t just have naked interests. Politics is about collective action, where different people cooperate for different reasons. It's also about enmity and polar- ization, but first and foremost about the common good. Both politics and art can help people to overcome social mistrust and the feeling of being los, by offering beter goals and a way of behaving that is more enjoyable than the brutally en forced corporate interests. ‘Weren't you accused of instrumentalizing art for political goals? (One of the effects of art consists in defamiliarizing standard practices and offering a new perspective that allows people to revisit their own ideas. In this sense, I don’t see a problem in using the potential of art to destabilize rational discourse and propose a reassessment of existing codes. One of the most remembered ex- amples of such endeavors concerned street crossings. People in Bogoté crossed the street wherever they pleased, but not atthe crossings. The number of casual- ties was very high and it was a major cause of fataittes inthe city, right after gunfire. There was a group of mimes performing outside the city council every day. Together with one ofthe strategists, Paul Bromberg, we decided to hire them for our civic program and have them mimic people's actions, highlighting the absurdity of what they were doing, putting thei lives at risk in the middle of the street. This is how we diverted their performance, making it productive. We also started painting yellow stars at spots where someone had been hit by a car. In some places you'd see real painterly constellations on the asphalt. The stars acted as a visual map of traffic accidents, a tangible picture of the statistics, which served to make both drivers and passers-by mote alert. The general idea is very simple: when I'm trapped in a corner and can’t find any other way out, Ido what an artist would do. What is to be done today, in 2012, in the midst of crises and revolts? The position of traditional poitis is being undermined by broad access to infor- mation, the web, and easily established networks. The supremacy of the mass- ‘media i eroded by new media, which allow for a decentralized, free and indepen- ‘and knowledge. Enjoying a greater level of autonomy, people now are free to look for explanations and answers on their own. They also look for emotions, in a way that is 2 lot more active than that offered by traditional press, radio and TV, We are getting closer to a real pluralism, Flash mobs are a harbinger of massive web-initiated and coordinated actions, Social dent circulation of inform FoRGer FeaR 169networks and actions with the potential for forming communities tend to replace ‘or reduce the power of the traditional political parties and authorities. There's no longer a need for a uniform to make successful actions possible. Gandhi was in favor of a selective cooperation with oppressors or illegitimate authorities on non- violent terms. The recent events in North Africa show an urgent need for protect ing nonviolent actions from being infected with violence. The moral authority of nonviolence is at stake. People will continue their nonviolent policy. and att should serve as the main tool for it. Art can create and impose meanings while 1g physical violence, The Vietnamese monks that committed self-immo- lation in 1967 had more moral power than the contemporary Palestinian »human bombs. who not only kill themselves, but twenty other people around them, The ‘monks did it asa symbolic act, which was more powerful precisely because it did rnot endanger the lives of the enemy. Self-regulation and a kind of reasonable in dulgence, which are pethaps more common in art, can help in preventing da matic acts of violence committed pour épater les bourgeois. ‘What would you do if you were the curator of the Berlin Biennale? A curator should understand and play with his or her role. The curator is the one ‘who controls the time and space of the vistors. What Kafka is to Prague, Dracula to Romania, and the monster to Loch Ness, artists are to Berlin. The starting point isto overcome the process of turning artists into commodities. Maybe I'd look to art which could make the German constitution more understandable. And, via the constitution, the position of art in Berlin, and through it,'a new model of citizen- ship. The phenomenon of constitutional patriotism in Germany is a Habermasian ‘concept, first used by the Frankfurter Aligemeine Zeitung as a headline in 1979, When the Basic Law (the German constitution) was thirty years old. Germany was the first country to develop a theory of post-nationalism. With all these national ties now present in Berlin, all these artists, curators, and art producers, it would be ‘worthwhile to understand that constitution, and the fact that we're all on common ies. The artists come to Berlin not because of low rents, but be- ‘cause German citizens have been reeducated not to be patriots supporting their ‘country. They can only be patriots of constitution, which opens up a space for ‘members of other nationalities living in Germany. Perhaps then as the curator I'd say: Hey, guys, art is not as relative as you may think; there are international agreements on the points you touch on. And politics is the fundament of it all, even if you think i's just a diny power game. Art could act as a voluntarily ad- opted means of self-control. It could redistribute its symbolic power to other fields, pedagogy or polities, for example, And what would be your project if you were an artist? recently left the Green party I had helped to establish. One of my dreams is to miake a video about all my hidden desites, sordid imerests, and thoughts. Just 0 present my whole dark side. It could be distributed freely among journalists and political opponents. And of course it would be potentially destructive, running a high risk of political suicide. People were already speaking of such risks when I decided to stay in politics despite being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Be: ing a politician, Id like to openly dectare who Lam. The video I'd make would be a statement: if you want to kill me politically, you can do it. And I would be i forming people that I have a phone rigged with two grams of dynamite whi could be detonated at any moment with a telephone signal. And you can kill me if {you like: just dial the number. The power is really in your hands. 170 PORGET FEARA BETTER ee Ua RS US | MOCKUS i MN LUCAS OSPINA in CONVERSATION with JOANNA WARSZABOGOTA CHANGE JW: Colombia used to be one of the most violent and dangerous countries in the ‘world. This has changed significantly in recent years. What role did artistic strate- gies play in this process? LO: When Antanas Mockus became the mayor of Bogoté in 1995 he proclaimed himself an »anti-politician.« He used this phrase as his weapon—even in the literal sense: Invited tothe presidential palace, he would go armed, proudly carrying a plas tic sword. It was also a statement of his poliey, based on the persuasive power of a ‘symbolic language, but devoid of any real violence. I's useful to make a distinction ‘between the two terms Mockus served as mayor. During the first (1995-7) he was very imaginative, acting with humor, and cautious, so as not to be consumed by power, In his second term (2001-3) he seemed more solemn and even wore a tie. During the first term, he splashed water on the face of another candidate as an ex- ample of delegated violence, a »new form of violence«: a war where people were to use symbols instead of bullets. Mockus was trying to perform his leadership like an ‘actor who wants to make viewers aware of political responsibility and the intricacies of power. He also developed a lot of strategies that played with our Christian feeling of guilt. When drivers parked their cars on sidewalks, not respecting pedestrian space, he used ‘mimes who reproached them by showing yellow or red cards, ike in a soccer match. Once they were shamed, the drivers would respect others. The red and yellow cards soon became a tool commonly used by people to react with if somebody did some- thing wrong. Mockus was a good-natured artist who employed very naive but effi cient popular symbols: for example he put on a bullet-proof vest but cut out a hole in the shape of a heart, It looked like a bad work of art but was really effective. But if somebody had shot him he could have died. Why is such art bad? He uses symbols, not signs. And what I like about artis that you can see things only as signs. They are not laden with ideology. When you bring them into the realm of politics, the signs become symbols; they have a purpose, a final sense. Mockus played a lot with this, He had a plastic figure in his office which he would punch before going to a meeting or when he discovered that somebody had stolen money from a social program. He even sad it on the news: » When I'm really angry I punch this puppet. If don’t, I would punch everybody else.« He would make it public, so it became a performance. From an artistic point of view, you could say he was using. but it worked! Mockus used art as a way of dealing with brutal reality and transformed it into an agent of political change. How exactly did that work? Politicians work with the capital of their reputation. As president you have a cer- tain political capital which you spend through your actions. And then you try to capitalize it again, to avoid political bankruptcy. Mockus spent his capital on a fot ‘of actions, some of them very controversial. But in the end he managed to increase it. The first time he gained national acknowledgement was when he took off his, pants in front of the art teachers and students at the National University. He felt ‘that making a comment about the behavior ofthe students, who were laughing and screaming at him constantly, was the thing to do. When somebody threw a shoe at him-—just like with Bush in Iraq—Mockus put it on his ear and said, »It seems that the shoe has nothing to say.« These are all performative political actions. A per former is a person who makes his presence felt in the room even if he doesn’t speak. FORGET FEAR mMockus was also playing withthe politcal limits, He introduced a law which banned the word »no.« So everything you said was affirmative, for instance: I should like my neighborhood; I should listen to music at low volume, and so on. He proposed that in all high schools there should be a course for teenagers called »Drinking.« That seemed more interesting than trying to ban drinking alcohol in general. His method vas simple: you have to stop thinking in traditional fashion, and teach people what they already know. Jacques Rancitre said that the best teacher is sometimes a bad one who fails to teach. Mockus called it recontextualisation. And he was trying to con- vince people not to wait forthe next Messiah, a savior or potential leader. Instead, we need to work on our politicians collectively, teach them and transform them into be- ings we actually need. It was exactly this participatory thinking that Mockus was highlighting. Politicians should stop being opportunistic creatures attempting all {kinds of political mimicry, and become people who can effectively teach others, and Who are ready to be taught themselves, Mockus had always said he didn’t need any money for his election campaign. Apart from having served as the mayor of Bogoti, he was to run in the presidential elec- tions. What was the public-relations strategy for his last presidential campaign’? ‘The 2010 presidential campaign of the Colombian Green Party, with Mockus as its candidate, took place without official posters or slogans. There was only the color ~reen and the image of a sunflower. The citizens produced their own posters, flyers, and images. You could get a blank green poster, add your own content, and stick it on the wall, in the window, or post it on your Facebook profile. It was a very effective campaign, conducted not by professional agencies, but simply by ordinary people. And very often these were minors not yet allowed to vote. Seeing such propaganda you thought that Mockus might actually stand a chance. It was important to see how this spontaneous campaign got such feedback, while the other candidate led a war on symbols. But Mockus wanted to promote his ideas, not his persona, He formed a coalition with two other candidates and each of them would work in the campaign for the other. Alone, he was sometimes erratic, even self-destructive. He did not use powerful symbols, except for the moral ones. There’s this image of Mockus in front ‘of a crowd; he is silent, his eyes closed, flanked by two candidates standing next 10 ing back and forth like a pendulum, or a puppet, supported by their hands, It was a visible exercise based on trust. For a leader he looked strange. ‘even fragile. It was a form of showing people that the leader is just a symbolic figure with very little or no power over his movements, Does that mean that he was not convinced of himself as a leader? ‘What the people expect from political language is a mixture of softness and readiness for brutal intervention. But Mockus was not able to combine the idea of tust and flex- ibility withthe powerful symbols or gestures that would show his capacity to react in difficult circumstances. He seemed unready for the power he Was given. He started the ‘campaign just four months before the elections in 2010, You could say that if Juan Manuel Santos, his rival, was running, Mockus was walking and even then he seemed even more tired during the campaign than the other candidate. There was something ‘unusual about his igure, about his body — let's call this political body —as if he were exhausted. He was just at the point of a political evolution, when he declared: »t's ‘wrong to think that people really need a leader. People shouldn't need a leader. People should be mature enough to respect the law individually, I do not want to force them to abide by the law; society is not a sandbox. I should be less of leader and more of a facilitator.« He stepped back too much and, inthe end, he lost people's attention, 14 FORGET FEARBOGOTA CHANGE He resigned from being a leader and delegated his campaign to the voters them- selves. It was an exercise in democracy. Recently I heard a lecture by the graphic designer Paula Scher where she differenti ated between being serious and being solemn, When you are doing something you «don’t have much experience in and you want to do it well, you tend to be very ser ‘ows, just lke a child when i's playing. At the end of the game, when you really know ‘what you're doing, you become solemn. And this is precisely what happened with Mockus. At the beginning he was really serious about his being a performer. In his Jast campaign, when people expected him to do the same thing, he was too solemn. He limited his repertoire to a handful of word games. When he was asked: »How \would you solve the homicide problem?,« he answered, »I will make everybody read Dostoyevsky.« That works if you went to university and read Crime and Punishment. But how do you carry this message to a wider audience? He should have done it as before, using the body and performance. He should have visualized it as a short story ‘of a man who killed his landlord and then felt guilty. He should have told it like a persuasive fairy tale. But he had already acquired this solemn attitude as a may experienced politician, and intellectual. Yet stil, he wanted to be an anti- politician. Pegay Phelan, a performance-studies theorist, defines performance as an event un= able to be repeated, that exists only in the present and in the experience. How does that relate to this kind of polities? Does one have to re-invent oneself each time, to avoid routine? By political standards, Mockus simply became over-coached. During the debates he ‘was solemn because he had rebearsed all the responses beforehand. So in the debates, ‘Mockus was no longer a performer. He remembered what he was told to answer and he ‘would answer. When he tried to getaway from the script, he was forcing himself to do so: it wasn’t spontaneous. An image advisor always tells a candidate or a politician to stick to the script, to remain within a safe area of phrases and gestures that were previ ‘ously effective. At the very beginning, Mockus would take is time before answering instead of shooting readymade and politically correct answers. He would say unusual things fora politician, or cry. There were even times he was at a loss for words. These ‘examples went beyond politics and resided in the realm of performance. One realized how his politcal behavior was structured atthe point when he started losing. Are there any real long-term effects of Mockus’s campaign in Colombia? Mockus is an episode in quite a long chain of political performers in Colombian politics. We had a leader of the Liberal Party, Jorge Eligcer Gaitin Ayala, who was indered in 1948, He was the organizer of an amazing March of Silence. He brought together a lot of people who marched the streets of Bogoté in silence. When they ‘convened in the city’s largest square, his political enemies expected him to make & big speech or a statement like, »Let’s go and kill the oligarchs ofthis country.« But he didn’t say anything and the people returned to their homes in silence. There are theories that he was later killed because ofthat. It was a proof of how powerfully he ‘could control the situation, Inthe 1970s there was a guerrilla group called the April 19th Movement, o M-19, ‘hich also used symbols as weapons and weapons as symbols. One of their frst polit cal performances was stealing Bolivar’s sword from the National Museum, and deli ering a justification speech that sounded like an avant-garde manifesto. They claimed that the objects in museums were dead and thatthe stolen sword a to be restored to the public realm and become an active symbol of the ongoing political struggle in Latin America. Today there's a nostalgia for Mockus' polities, but his political practice is FORGET FEAR 115‘unfortunately losing its impact. His personality was important, his originally Lithua- ‘ian name and immigrant origins. He's a gringo, a foreigner who has lived and always wil live as a Colombian, You could compare it to an anit who isa stranger come from outer space to transform the life of the natives, a person put in a context he does not completely belong in. It is important to understand the phenomenon of Mockus in the Context of a country like Colombia, which remained off-limits to immigrants for many years, during the Second World War and afterwards. And of course, he also made us ‘understand that it is not only artists who can use artistic strategies and tools like images, signs, symbols, and humor, in mainstream polities. We still believe that, as artists, we have direct access to a powerful visual languiage, and that we can make use of this practical knowledge of atistc communication and of our hyper-senstivity to social issues. There's a lot of other people working with images: politicians, historians, clinicians, ete. So the only artists who can be suecess- ful in this field are those who really dedicate themselves to social work; let's eall them the believers. Smart believers, who understand the social field and the connec: tions to other professionals working there for a fonger time. We get to see many of these parachutist vartist-social workerse who drop from the sky, work briefly with the local community, then take a few snapshots and put them on their website as evi dence of participatory artwork. ‘There are artists who are experts in flying from residency to residency in order to take up social issues. The context-responsive character of their work often results in reinforcing various hidden and all-to-easy agendas, such as the weak symbolic position of minorities or other oppressed groups. On the other hand, the presence of an artist could very well bring about a recontextualization and trigger, much as Mockus did, a shift in the self-reflection of a community. This process later helps in the work of educators, social agents, or politicians. Antists who do site-specific work with local communities might think their artis al ready political just because they say so. But to be political, art needs to have a real political dimension: clear, consistent view, a defined social goal, something very ma- terial. If you really believe in the idea of political practice, you shouldnt limit it to an aanwork. Unfortunately, art-world fame and visibility often obscure other modes of education, self-improvement,ete. In tis sense, they fail to trigger a social chain reac- ton and the wish fora different life. ‘Mockus wasn’t interested in symbolic or added value: what he rally cared about was the social work and the consequences of his actions. But of course, there are many ‘examples of fake engagement of artists in such fieldwork. In Colombia, where the art ‘market is almost non-existent, there's a huge dependence of art on the state or even ‘on the academic system. So state-dependent art of this kind expects social return and exposure or academic value in return, You see a lot of art pretending to be socially engaged, whereas what is realy at stake is just immaterial profits and artificial re- sults. Any art which does not fall within this category Mockus was not interested in: ‘egotistical, solitary, and politically incorrect art the art brut which prefers to speak using form instead of concepts, narcissistic art-for-ans-sake, the art of the cynics, capitalist art. Mockus has been criticized because the greater economic model that he implemented as mayor didn’t differ from the existing, neoliberal one. Even during his last run forthe presidency, he claimed that he would follow the line of the previ- ‘ous president: he said he would not change something that is already working. He ‘would not remove a person from a position in which this person was doing well. I is Jifficut to locate his politics and art on any one side of the political spectrum, be it capitalism or the opposite. He simply used art to create a better political world 116 FORGET FEAR. wom WouLrios waa v