Death to the real

DEATH TO THE REAL. A MANIFESTO ON RADICAL DOCUMENTARY ART FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH. 

Pablo MZ

As read on the Forensic Landscapes room of the digital exhibition of IDFADoclab 2020 on Wednesday November 25. 

Reality is violent. 

Reality is unjust. 

Reality is carnage. 

Reality is upside down. 

Reality, as we know it, is colonial heritage.

We need to be agents of transformation. 

We need to turn things around. 

Decolonizing is just another strategy of colonization taught in the universities of the Global-not-so-Global North, repe-pe-pe-pe-pe-pe-ated by the media.

Reality is fiction. 

Reality is a huge historical lie. 

Reality is fake with a fat and capital F. 

Reality is conquest. 

We need to conquer reality. 

We need to eliminate reality in order to reinvent what’s real.

To reimagine what can be real. 

What makes us real. 

What reeks of our real eye that seeks to penetrate in the forms of life. 

Reality must be viral. Must contaminate itself. 

Reality must self destruct. 

Reality must get infected with reality. 

Challenge any attempt to make us immune to the creative power of reality. 

Non-fiction is a fallacy. Fiction is non-fiction and non-fiction is fiction, everything else is just a marketplace for the eye and the ear, a strategy to monetize our imagination. 

 I place my bets on a documentary art that shifts the current state of affairs, instead of a meagre representation of events. 

Radical reality needs to reinvent technology. 

To follow the trends means no revolution. 

To revolutionize is to question the trends.

To defy the marketplace. 

To reinvent oneself and how we see, feel, imagine. 

Documentary art is sacrificial love. 

Documentary art implies the intervention of reality.

A radical inversion of reality is what we need to perform. 

A centrifuge glance that deconstructs itself perpetually. 

Because creation is an act of rebirth. 

And like birth, violent in itself. 

The violence of birth is opposite to the violence of market brutality, to the violence of our constant state of war.

The violence of birth is creative violence. 

Documentary art is creative violence.  

We need to shift reality upside down. 

We need to kill the real in order to reinvent life. 

It’s all we have. It’s all we have.