The two-year artistic research project deals with the role of the protest image and its possible impact on real social, political, and economic changes. Through its individual outputs, the project offers multiple perspectives on the use of visual or audiovisual documentation as a possible emancipatory tool of the people. In many places, an online exhibition suffices as visual documentation of political protest, seemingly steeped in a specific aura emanating from the situation in which the images were captured. Such images have the power to be at the same time both documentation and action. However, as much as they may represent an ideal space for the formulation of individual or collective freedoms, the authors of the exhibition also attempt to take into account their connection to the possibilities and conditions of those who produce these images. Lucie Rosenfeldová and Matěj Pavlík thus proceed from their interest in the belief that it is possible, through the capturing of protest images, to contribute significantly to socio-political change as well as from the attempt to come to terms with their own skepticism towards this idea in the context of contemporary image production.
In their individual outputs, the artists point out the material and institutional conditions of the protest image (Living with Ghosts, Leaflets and Sympathies), analyze several historical attempts to realize the idea of democratization through the media (Streaming and Belonging), and, together with Filip Láb, investigate the possibilities of contemporary citizen journalism and its limits in the efforts to achieve a more equal and democratic approach to the dissemination of information. The project thus seeks, and perhaps outlines, a way of thinking about the relationship between politics and display technologies beyond the axis of techno-optimism and techno-pessimism.
