Image as Protest

ONE DAY IN 1932, the Russian avant-garde artist, Vladimir Tatlin, walked out of his studio at the Novodevichy Convent in the centre of Moscow. He made his way to a field in the nearby countryside where he tested his bird-like flying machine, Letatlin. Tatlin’s aim was to offer the ordinary person unlimited mobility, to reclaim the skies and promise a functional everyday vehicle for the cities of the future. The artists of the Russian Revolution – Rodchenko, Malevich, Tatlin, Stepanova, and Lissitzky – saw the birth of human aviation and flight as synonymous with the birth of a new proletarian world order that demanded revolutionary, new art. The visions of the artists and the architects of the Soviet avant-garde were cast towards the skies, while the Russian Cosmists sought to free the human spirit from the binding pull of gravity.

One may imagine extrapolating the modernist adventure of flight into the present age, crowded with the competing technologies of surveillance. The global pandemic has exposed this ever-tightening grip of neo-liberal, surveillance capitalism that Shoshana Zuboff defined as “an expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of people’s sovereignty.”1 The eyes of global surveillance penetrate earthwards as a panoptic instrument of control, stifling localised knowledge, referred to by James Scott as “state simplifications” that can only be challenged by the “knowledge embedded in local experience.”2 This sits in opposition to what Foucault described as “disciplinary power”, which permeates the societal body through constant monitoring of the populace.3

In her seminal oeuvre, Caliban and the Witch, the trailblazing Italian feminist philosopher Silvia Federici defines state-supported and church-endorsed oppression, and control of society, by citing the systematic abuse, enslavement, subjugation, and murder of