C H A N T A L M E Z A
Mixed media; books, ink, resin, fibre glass, wire & coffe. 200 x 200cm, 2019. Private Collection, UK
work in progress
Mixed media; books, ink, resin, fibre glass, wire & coffe. 200 x 200cm, 2019. Private Collection, UK
THE INSPIRATION
" I took 11 books from the Political Philosopher Brad Evans to create this piece, to me, the words were not only opening other worlds, but they were showing me, through a visual insight the great violence of the world.
The words on these pages don't merely depict or narrate the history of atrocity and the painful conditions of human existence. I think they demand we confront the intolerable, which has precisely inspired me to tear the wounds of the words apart and excavate the devastation of its prose.
I wanted to create on this piece something like the blood that weeps out from every page, the wires that bind across its disordered layering, and to sever the neat and ordered binding of history, which despite the best intentions, still frames and excludes.
I see this as a work yet to be worked upon, due to my intention to keep adding the new books Brad Evans continues to write."
THE BOOKS
DELEUZE & FASCISM
The book provides a theoretically distinct approach to the problem of fascism and its relations with liberalism and modernity in both historical and contemporary contexts.
ROUTLADGE
LIBERAL TERROR
This illuminating book by Brad Evans provides a critical evaluation of the wide ranging terrors which are deemed threatening to advanced liberal societies.
POLITY
RESILIENT LIFE
Resilience, they argue, is a neo-liberal deceit that works by disempowering endangered populations of autonomous agency. Its consequences represent a profound assault on the human subject whose meaning and sole purpose is reduced to survivability. Not only does this reveal the nihilistic qualities of a liberal project that is coming to terms with its political demise.
POLITY
HISTORIES OF VIOLENCE
Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.
ZED BOOKS
KOREAN \ PORTRAITS OF VIOLENCE
2018 'Independent Publisher Book Awards' winner.
NEW INTERNATIONALISTS
DISPOSABLE FUTURES
"This is a must-read book for anyone ready to transcend fear and imagine a new reality."--Tikkun
Disposable Futures makes the case that we have not just become desensitized to violence, but rather, that we are being taught to desire it.
CITY LIGHTS
GERMAN \ PORTRAITS OF VIOLENCE
Hannah Arendt, Franz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Paolo Freire, Michel Foucault, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, and Giorgio Agamben each have ten pages to tell their story in this innovative graphic title.
NEW INTERNATIONALISTS
SPANISH \ RESILIENT LIFE
Los autores desmenuzan la urdimbre de poder que opera mediante el imaginario de resiliencia; observan el proceso de cambio del liberalismo, desde una estrategia basada en el ofrecimiento de seguridad a una en que se institucionaliza la inseguridad y se celebra la resiliencia de las poblaciones ante las catástrofes.
FONDO DE CULTURA ECONOMICA
PORTRAITS OF VIOLENCE
Bringing together established academics and award-winning comic book writers and illustrators, Portraits of Violence illustrates the most compelling ideas and episodes in the critique of violence.
VIOLENCE
A series of penetrating conversations originally published in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
ATROCITY EXHIBITION
A collection of writings, reflections, and interviews from political philosopher and critical theorist Brad Evans, written between 2010 and 2017.
NEW INTERNATIONALISTS
CITY LIGHTS
LA REVIEW OF BOOKS
Text by the Political Philosopher Brad Evans
on 'The Ruins of Language' artwork
How can we do aesthetic justice to words that speak directly to the problem of violence? And how might we reveal the violence it does to us upon reading their tales? Language can injury us and it can bring us to the point of ruination. We can feel every word cutting into our skin, every line of every letter marking the body and tearing open the memory of life.
As Franz Kafka once wrote: “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us".
To know more about Brad Evans
click in the links below
HISTORIES OF VIOLENCE
