V. Missing Things— Noisy Activism

BARBARA HOLUB’S NOISY ACTIVISM

Paul O’Neill

When scrolling through documentation of artist Barbara Holub and transparadiso’s public art practices of the last twenty years, you will see many recurring motifs. You will see structures being built, assembled, things being made. You will see research-led exhibitions involving temporary architectural settings with something happening within their spaces. Within these spatial scenarios, there is an unfolding of the social, some form of gathering, some kind of conviviality, relationality, intersectionality. Often, you will see people standing among other people and things, lots of groups, where much listening and talking seems to be taking place, but without many spectators. Something seems to be happening, but there is not a lot to see. Instead, there is a sense of lightness, of breathing, of porosity.1

Holub’s projects often focus on setting in motion a context for bringing people into the process from the beginning. People are mostly gathered or huddled together, sometimes in conversation, mostly not, and standing or sitting, attending to one another and their surroundings, they are mainly in smaller groups. There is always a lot of information, both spoken, and written—language is everywhere: in single-word phrases, full sentences, whole texts, typed on banners, in design objects, on textiles, placards, posters with slogans, titles, questions, lists, glossaries, claims, manifestos, uttered urgencies, notes, jokes, observations, scribbles, stated desires and fully formed statements. All these settings, words, people and their actions, make up the work of the artist’s silent activism .

However, Holub’s silent activism is neither silent nor merely activist. Instead of silence, there is an undercurrent of mumbling voices, a rumbling swell of noisy resistance, where the resultant works can also be bold, unequivocally loud, even full of ranting and raving. At the same time, the four well-trodden tenets of activism—advocacy, subversion, facilitation and healing—are constantly embroiled in a convoluted tension between the artist’s desire for poetic forms of social resistance and the need for more direct approaches to imminent structural change. The works are always unique and site-responsive, yet they learn from, and are interconnected with, one another, accumulative while stretched across place and time.

Direct urbanism is a term often used to describe the approach of Barbara Holub and the work of transparadiso—the artist’s collaborative practice with architect/ urbanist Paul Rajakovics since 1999. They have developed