Mariana Zamarbide: Unfolding a particular moment: Falling inside out / Society of Control / Request for Terror.

Advisor / tutor: Doreen Mende

Independent reviewer: Fereshte Moosavi

Arnhem, June 2013

Abstract

The subject of this thesis evolves around a personal experience I had in 2000, after having emigrated from Argentina to Spain only six months before, where I was accused of collaborating with the terrorist organization ETA. My work as an artist is based on personal situations and the way in which I understand the world was transformed by these experiences. For a long time I have tried to incorporate the material of this event into my work, but my attempts failed because of the difficulty of its lasting emotional charge and the complexity of the interrelated personal and political elements contained by it. For this reason, and through my theoretical approach to the subject from authors such as Deleuze, Kafka and Dolar, I try to address issues or structural lines that cross my ongoing reflection on this experience, such as: the fall, the assignment of roles by the system, the notion of password and individual/dividual's in the society of control analyzed by Deleuze and the production of images as news about this story by the media.

My methodology is focused on how to deepen my understanding for and unfold the different aspects of a personal experience – one that has made a deep impression on me and transformed my view of the world. Furthermore, I explore how personal experiences can work within some invisible aspects of the system of control in which we operate, and finally how I can make an impact with this system.

Review

I believe Mariana's thesis interestingly unpacks a moment of discomfort-ness through which her personal experience perfectly sets out to a broader ground of knowledge production. Her thesis began with a convenient information contextualising the becoming of an uneasy moment, through a well-storied manner followed by a historical fact as of making the former realisable. Despite the existing difficulties and struggle for having imaginary arguments on concepts such as terror, Mariana's personal encounter remarkably addresses this phenomenon within an everyday life. Furthermore, she introduces various components of concepts such as the "fall" into the discussion, by which her positionality within the odd event of her experience shifts dramatically. Nonetheless, her analysation of 'falling' between the being a terrorist and not being a terrorist, in both cases, strongly contemplates the gravity of the state's rule in calling one terrorist or not. In other words, the notion of falling is limited within the understating of the gravity and not in weightlessness. The unfolding of the system of the society of control and the ways in which such an arrest becomes acceptable by public in order to gain their security, has been interestingly pointed out through the explanation of different image productions of this event. Nevertheless, I believe Mariana's approach towards an alternative understanding of this phenomenon whether it be pro or anti terrorist remains descriptive. Overall, I think Mariana's thesis very interestingly wonders whether this experience produces a different structure of knowing in the falling inside/out of the society of control. F.M.