Manifests Are Meant to Clear the Air and Challenge – Nobody Has the Right to Obey
Keywords:
device, aesthetic practice, participation, autonomous thought, emancipation, Roger Bernat, Roberto Fratini, manifestAbstract
The commentary classifies Roger Bernat’s and Roberto Fratini’s FFF manifest, published in 2018, as an artistic praxis. It shows that the drafting itself of a manifest can be understood as a performative practice: the commented text, which is only perceived in a mediate manner in terms of its information content, appears as performative; in other words, as it directly reaches the readers and with the associations and ideas it unleashes.
It is not until the “guidelines of an aesthetics of devices” emerge, announced towards the end of the manifest, that it also becomes the description of an aesthetic programme. In its turn, this aesthetic practice can target political objectives while creating an aesthetic confusion, unfolding a critical effect on itself and acting as a call to an autonomous performance. The readers of the manifest, as well as the audience of an FFF performance, can adopt and put into practice a stance of their own within the debate that this provokes.
