Idiom

The Excluded. Zeitgeist

Exclusion is, after all, the waste of progress;
and one wonders whether it is indeed its sideline,
or rather its main line of production and staple product:
its latent, yet genuinely principal function . . .

(Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Fear)

The recently popular word ‘exclusion’, which speakers are eager to use in any context they find convenient, can define more than a social group, a collective entity that has been given this stigmatising label. Exclusion is also a state of existence. The contemporary person, a citizen of a world that is overcrowded yet marked by solitude, one that is extremely rich yet immersed in poverty, is extended between two totalities: between immersion in a system and the continuous threat of being beyond it in the abyss of rejection. The limits of being excluded are liquid and signify a state of continuous insecurity and ambivalence. It is, therefore, difficult to believe that there is a single person whom the state of non-belonging does not apply to. This state of insecurity and loneliness is, perhaps, one of the most universal human feelings and, according to some philosophers, it is a state that marks our whole existence: from the moment we are born until we die. When asked who he was the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran responded: ‘I am a stranger to the police, to God, to myself’. We are excluded within the world and, likewise, within existence. The consequences of the tension that we endure are manifested on many levels. We endlessly contrive new reasons for and methods of dividing into groups, strata and species; we specialise in mutual separation that is also made according to mental, economic, social and identity-related criteria.

The projects shown within the Idiom are artistic emanations of exclusion. In this narrative about isolation and solitude no one can feel superior or non-excluded. Each project plays this state out in a different way, but all of them show that exclusion is made of many layers, that it is a process which touches the whole individual leading to, most often, incomprehension and the desire to return to the state of normality, even if this normality is hell.

The presented artistic languages try to use their polyphonic voices to tell about the condition of being excluded seen as the contemporary Zeitgeist. These are not tautological or correct illustrations of this phenomenon indicating who is and who is not excluded or how to reduce the existing injustice and fear. The artistic programme of the Idiom is an attempt to communicate with the viewers – to move them and to allow them to expose the areas and experiences of exclusion within them. The projects to be presented bring to the surface the concealed and the difficult. This is aimed at awakening sensitivity in the viewer, in addition to a will to find and identify oneself within a painful duality: that of being the excluded and the excluder. The projects refer to the figures and myths that continue to co-create contemporary social awareness. They revisit the overwhelming facts inscribed into the stories of specific places and move on the extreme roadsides of European reality. They show unity in exclusion, the radical equality of us all. They also confront the darkness of the human interior in its relentless negation of death and the struggle with the grey zone of exclusion.

Exclusion is a dependent state that is sensitive to circumstances, to secondary phenomena and to the margins of dominating narratives and orders. An excluded person disrupts the order and discloses flaws in the system which, despite its declarative nobleness, is based on violence and authority being, therefore, hypocritical. However, the excluded do not have to be solely marked by being beyond or being doomed to passivity and isolation. The state has a potential for greater self-awareness and courage, as well as a higher capacity for defiance and emancipation.

Katarzyna Tórz_IDIOM: Excluded Programme Curator