The Monster Is Us: Violence, Nonviolence, and the Authoritarian Turn

The Monster Is Us: Violence, Nonviolence, and the Authoritarian Turn is part of the symposium series Gender and Equality in the Arts.

With contributions by Basma al-Sharif, Elizabeth Breiner of Forensic Architecture, Candice Breitz, Sofia Karim, Roman Selim Khereddine, Diego Marcon, Ingo Niermann, Oleksiy Radynski, Tai Shani, Stas Shärifullá, and Latefa Wiersch. Moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer. Research: Marion Ritzmann.

On-site: Auditorium D 1.04, Tower Building, HGK Basel FHNW, and livestream. The symposium is open to the public and will be held in English. Free admission. More information and program: dertank.ch.

Amid the unqualified violence of the past year and years—with genocidal wars waged mostly against civilians—we have been reflecting on the dehumanization and demonization process heralded by such war’s wagers, by despots and democratically elected leaders alike. Antonio Gramsci’s infamous lines, wildly paraphrased, from a fascist prison: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Gramsci’s reflection on the interregnum, a Roman idea of the limbolike moment when legality is suddenly suspended, also suggests the meaning of monster itself, which likely derives from the Latin verb monere, meaning, to warn. An alarm, then.

It appears that we are now in a new time of monsters—as authoritarianism moves faster than any progressive sense of solidarity and collective politics can. We’d like to ask you to join us for our two-day fall symposium, The Monster Is Us: Violence, Nonviolence, and the Authoritarian Turn, to be held on November 26 and 27, 2024, in Basel and online. Here we will speak within a space of artistic discourse and education—not as policy makers but as thinkers, artists, performers, writers, and filmmakers—about how our time of shattering violence might be reconsidered and contravened across our practices of living, working, and resisting together. When invocations of nonviolence are inevitably used by violent state actors to undermine resistance movements by the most oppressed peoples—and as we turn away from democratic structures toward fascism globally—how to consider the trope and figure of the monster anew, without the flat rhetoric in which it is often cast?

The symposium will be, in a sense, not just about a monstrous moment but devoted to the consideration of a figure that appears without fail in contemporary life, its politics, theories, literatures, cinemas, performances and much else. What role does the monster play in our fictions and images, realities and rhetoric, our senses of self and other? The Monster Is Us: Violence, Nonviolence, and the Authoritarian Turn is part of the biannual symposia series curated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW. Ongoing since 2018, the series of symposiums is part of the Institute’s curriculum and considers artistic practice in its entanglements with power, gender, language, coloniality, and ecology.

The symposium is dedicated to the memory of Mohammed Sami Qariqa.

Press contact: Institute Art Gender Nature, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, Anna Francke: email, T +41 61 228 43 25.