Advisor/tutor: Bassam el Baroni
Arnhem, June 2017

Abstract

This paper stemmed from the incapability to be indifferent, and the urgency to call for conscious art and fiction making in the time we live in, as an attempt to rescue imagination from the unlimited freedom Deleuzian fabulation has conferred to it. My philosophical speculation alights from the poetical preposition revolutionary redecoration.

Redecorating implies working on what is already there, yet making it more appealing or up to date. Pairing it with revolutionary, I try to imbricate aesthetics and politics, to avoid any sort of surrealism. My trajectory goes from the representational struggle of the collective body, to the investment of the subject of human capital, through a feminist revision of the notion of inheritance that entails sustainability and responsibility. Being humans, makers of the world, and artists, makers precisely involved in transmission and participation, the heir is the empty subject of and influenced by the artwork. By analysing objects of utterance and enactment, such as manifestoes and diegetic prototypes, I stress the urgency to imagine, formulate, and lay claims. Prototypes are models constructed to test a concept or a process, or act as a thing to be learned from, which serves to provide specifications for a real system, rather than a theoretical framework. Prototypes ought to be self-consistent and are born of the close collaboration of different disciplines. I analyse in more detail diegetic prototypes as fictional objects that inserted into a narrative can prove their value in action and appear appealing. As in the neoliberal condition, the determination of value is an issue of power. Virtual witnessing that the prototype demands implies collective questioning and verification, essential to any revolutionary redecoration.