Communality in Sikinos

Social identity and the myths and ideologies predominating in the contemporary world are among the subjects explored at this year’s Little Islands Festival, running August 19-22 at Sikinos’ capital, Hora. Themed “Communality,” Okwui Enwezor uses the Hardt and Negri Empire. He invokes the “cosmological” descriptions of the relations of social production which have been released from the mechanism of the nation state and a new type of sovereignty emerges which they give the name “empire”. If we consider that defending our social rights implies moving away from the confinement and dependence of all kinds of markets that are hungry for new resources and new places to devour for the sole benefit of profit, then we have discovered that there is a sick order of things.

Ideological debates have lost all meaning, politics is a vast market for goods, democracy is a pretext and laws are a pretext to perpetuate power and the vast corruption that accompanies it. The major confusion is to believe that material goods are objects for achieving a high quality of life. The starting point for our narrative is the recurring crises and a general climate of decline that has followed a sequence of events in recent years. This sequence has influenced man on a global scale to discover that the thirst for material goods does not exist without repercussions. Man has lost touch with the concept of community, as the effects of his actions on the environment make him seem immersed in a society of fictitious abundance. He lives like a sleepwalker, divided between fear and desire. He follows the race of matter, languishing in the trauma of returning to experience, and he feels that the closer he gets to saturation of matter, the more he sinks into the vortex of alienation. But this society of abundance is for the very few, some will simply live while the vast majority must starve and the community loses its true value. Defending our individual and social existence means creating zones freed from all sorts of dictatorships where free access, creation and direct democracy will show that the state without its people is nothing. We must demand the salvation of all of us. We ourselves are entrusted with the task of creating the foundations for a truly humane society, what we call community.