DISFUNCTIONAL SYSTEM RESEARCH

1. POWER
Foucault: "Society must be defened"

Power does not apply to individuals, but transits through individuals

What makes a body, gestures, speeches, desires to be identified and constituted as individuals, is already one of the first effects of power.

The power goes through the individual that it has constituted.

Sovereign power: The sovereign has a right to subtract – to take life, to enslave life, etc. – but not the right to control life. Disciplinary power: Disciplinary power has "individuals" as its object, target and instrument. Disciplinary power's techniques create a "rational self-control", it focuses on details. "individual" is a construct created by disciplinary power. Biopower: power over bios (life) – power over populations. Biopolitics of the human species. Biopower studies populations and tries to adjust, control or eliminate these norm deviations.

Biopower takes over life, oversees it, and because of that it was possible to introduce a cesura between what must live and what must die: racism. Racism will allow to establish between my life and the death of the other a relationship that is not a military or warrior of confrontation, but a biological relationship.

My work often tends to rely on emotions and metaphorical language, in which it is difficult to distinguish where I end and where the other begins. This creates tension, vulnerability and some ambiguity. As a result, my approach has never been surgical and structured, both in research and execution.

Politics is war continued by other means.

Where there is a power that in the first instance is a bio power, racism is indispensable as a condition to be able to condemn someone to death, to be able to put others to death. From the moment the state functions on the basis of bio-power, the homicidal function of the state itself can only be assured by racism.

POWER

-self-determination
-discernment
-responsibility

-subjection,
-blindness,
-delegation

RELIGION

INDIVIDUAL

SOCIETY

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

the experience of having to choose between two powers, living the social pressure that comes from one and the other equally. In this dynamic the "personal" choices are constantly under judgement.

NOTES FOR THE WRITING ASSIGNEMENT

ISSUES RELATED TO POWER IMPORTANT TO ME

Political works that have the function of revealing and identifying power and how it acts. I prefer large themes, or macro themes, those from which different social problems are declined or from which power, in its most abusive form, is structured in individual thought and behavior. Taking a position is the personal aspect of this approach, opening a debate and being an active part of it. I prefer to argue than provoke.

Stories that testify to the absolute dignity and beauty, as peculiar as universal, of being dysfunctional human beings. In other words, the difficulty of feeling that one has to put aside one's own problematic issues in order to gain a place in society.

I am also interested in the relationship between photographer and subject. But I think that is something I'm gonna consider while working, independently from the topic I am working on.

- Given the evolution in our society, what could be integrated or applied Foucault's discourse?
- How does the concept of privacy fit into his discourse?
- How the title can be percived/readed? How many prospects are there?
- How does he position the transgression in our society?

QUESTIONS PANNEL

2. SUBJECT
BELL HOOKS "The oppositional Gaze, black female spectators"
LAURA MULVEY "Visual Pleasure"
JHON BERGER "Ways of seen"

- How was ordinary life represented in the family albums of black families?
- How does the concept of privacy interlocus with representation?
- How does the concept of intimacy interlocus with representation?
- How does the concept of solitude interlocus with representation/gaze?
- Are we the gaze or the mediator of the gaze of the subject and the gaze of the spectator?
- Are the subject of the pictures alive?
- Is identity a matter of power?

QUESTIONS PANNEL

THE MISSING PERSPECTIVE ON HAPPINESS

VOYEURISM - EGO
IDENTITY - POWER
INTIMACY - PRIVACY
REFLECTION(THEORY)-IDENTIFICATION
SUBJECT - LOOK BACK, OPPOSITIONAL GAZE
CRITICAL SPECTATOR - POWER
DECONSTRUCTION - INTERROGATION

KEY WORDS

NOTES FOR THE WRITING ASSIGNEMENT

TOPIC

SUBJECT

MAKER

AUDIENCE

relation of power

gaze

gaze

gaze

what is the space that the subject has? do we use our gaze or do we mediate - create space - for two others gaze to encounter? as photographers, we and the subjects are the only ones who know what was happening when the pictures were taken. The picture then is the representation of something we decided it had to be like it.

looking at the family album as critical spectaros

Rather than being directed at extraordinary ‘material worlds’, the 'family gaze’ is concerned with the ‘extraordinary ordinariness’ of intimate ‘social worlds’.
The Family Gaze, Michael Haldrup, Jonas Larsen

The traditional family album as a repository of partially explored memories is contrasted with its role in constructing a mythology of an ideal.
Inhabiting the image: photography, therapy and re-enactment phototherapy, Rosy Martin

a mutual interest in the resulting work, but
subjects of images apart from ourselves.
PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA

Apart from an ordinary, domestic or personal image, we can also define a family photo as a constructed image of the family and of its memory.

Family photographs may affect to show us our past, but what we do with them—how we use them—is really about today, not yesterday. These traces of our
former lives are pressed into service in a never-ending process of making, remaking, making sense of, ourselves—now.
—Annette Kuhn, “Remembrance,” in Family Snaps, p. 22

photography becomes a rite of family life just when, in the industrializing
countries of Europe and American, the very institution of the family starts undergoing radical surgery.. .photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life.
—Susan Sontag, On Photography, p. 8

Since the gaze is fundamental to a photographic exchange, Family albums provide a rich resource for autobiographical storytelling and an exploration of family systems: how it was to be part of this family and how these early experiences continue to affect the individual. Each of us only has the images we inherited; precious, since they offer each of us images of the self, as we grew up, and a fragile framework for memories. Precious too, once family members have died, and their photographic image becomes a means of recall. But the traditional family album is an ideological construct (Spence & Holland, 1991). Editorial control is held by the archivist. Like a public relations document, the family album mediates between the members of the family, providing a united front to the world, in an affirmation of successes, celebrations, high days and holidays, domestic harmony and togetherness. It is bound within established codes of commemorative convention, so ubiquitous that they are taken for granted, even minutely reconstructed and sold back to us in advertising campaigns.

-Inhabiting the Image: photography, therapy and re-enactment phototherapy, Rosy martin