We Need to Talk About Guns

“Partnership, stability, prosperity,” “tradition is the future,” read the slogans accompanying the centerpiece image of an armed soldier over a sunset, welcoming visitors to the Display gallery in Prague. But this exhibition of photographs and videos of the famous Czech weapon – the Scorpion 61 – in popular culture and throughout history was not the only feature of the We Love Shooting project, prepared by the 8lidí collective and audiovisual artist Jiří Žák. Apart from the gallery installation, the project also includes theater performances and a series of thematic lectures for the public that took place over the course of 2022 (featuring, for example, Markéta Kutilová, Zeina Kanawaiti, and others).

We Love Shooting lies somewhere between theater and participative performance and contains notable features of visual and audiovisual art. Such an event format is typical for the 8lidí collective, who often work with the audience as an active co-producer of the work itself. By means of diverse, more or less participative methods, they focus on the viewer’s position not only as part of the theater, but also within the wider context of the select topic and their individual position within wider society.^[1] The 8lidí collective is also characterized by their collective work method, where each person performs different creative roles for each project. A given performance or happening is often produced by only some of the collective’s members, but they create various constellations with different people fulfilling various roles. This may also be the reason why their projects are most often presented in so-called blocks and not continually throughout the year. Considering the demands on production, finances, and time, there have so far been only 12 performances during one week, and other reprises are being planned for September of this year.

To walk, for a few moments, in the shoes of those who co-decide and cooperate on the distribution of firearms in the world is also a good way to catch a glimpse of the decision-making process of such business transactions. We Love Shooting consists partly of a vernissage – the presentation of what ought to be seen – as well as the General Meeting, which invites the attendants to observe the goings on of the GunCzech company behind closed doors. In the “backstage,” everyone is seated around one table to talk about guns, discuss the company operations, and the behavior of its representatives.

Everyone who takes part in the meeting receives a separate brief and a script of the given “role,” as well as a short introduction to their backstory and their characteristic behavior during the meeting. The gradual inclusion of those present makes for a bodily experience connected to an ascribed position within the arms company. The audience thus becomes the conduit for pre-prepared theses and statements they may personally disagree with. It is exactly through such a realization of the dissonance between one’s own standpoints and the prescribed statements and those of the other characters that the performance forces us to adopt a standpoint to the emerging narrative. Because it is framed by the complicated, multilayered, and ambivalent topic of the arms industry, it is very hard to understand it in full and rather seems to invoke a strategy of “embodied experience” as a functional, albeit manipulative, tool. It is also not certain what would happen if one were to contradict the prescribed instructions and how the “assistants” leading the entire meeting would react to a potential mutiny, which brings into the fold another level of thinking about collective guilt and decision-making processes.

 

As their method of choice, the producers did not choose immersion, meaning the attempt at a well-defined immersion into the narrative, nor empathy, nor even identification with the role – the given characteristics were, after all, too brief for that. Rather, they tried to capture the specific rhetoric of the arms industry as an accepted but also problematic business sphere. The appropriation of phrases and negotiation processes over the course of the performance challenges our own expectations about the politics of the production and distribution of weapons. Homi K. Bhabha says something similar about such a rhetoric when he demonstrates the “myth of the transparency” of the human actor and the rationality of political conduct. Bhabha particularly believes that the focus on rhetoric (and writing) can help uncover the discursive ambivalence which allows for the formulation of the political: “The language of critique is effective […] to the extent to which it overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new […] properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics.”^[2]

In the performance, we do not, after all, encounter any character who would disagree or even critically question the core, which is the celebration of profit from the sale of killing tools. And that is despite the fact that in some scenes we are made to see certain “negative phenomena,” such as withholding connections to the weapons’ end recipients, which points to the disregard for regulatory laws on their export to territories plagued by human rights violations. The reason this is being discussed is however not to resolve the problem itself, but rather to punish whoever foolishly talked about this fact in public. And in the following scene, the spokeswoman instructs people how to properly react to questions from the media related to authoritarian regimes. The problem itself is then reduced to a means of rhetoric. In connection to the aforementioned quote by Homi K. Bhabha, we can say that the transformation of our own understanding of the political level – i.e. the identification of the transfer of attention from the content (what it does) to its form (how people talk about it) – can also help us accept (new) political levels of a given phenomenon. Rather than adopting the “good-bad” binary positions, it is the very method of its construction that comes to the fore.

At times, the performance takes the appropriation of the formal aspects of the narrative of the arms business and arms export to a level of hyperbolic absurdity while at other times it resonates in its pure cynicism, and sometimes both these positions overlap – for example the ironic “gag” of predicting new military conflicts by means of the traditional act of casting lead from a melted shell and the subsequent attempt to identify the shape of a country where they will soon need more weapons. Or on the other hand, a video presentation documenting the day-to-day life in the centers of Syrian cities before 2011 – these are played by the soon-retiring business representative for the Middle East to show how he will remember his working years abroad after retiring. Apart from the still intact civilization, the video also shows young people speaking about their study plans, having fun, and thinking about their promising future. Playing at an arms company and thinking about the current position of the young people from the video and the state of Syria is also determined by the performed distinction of “us” and “them” – us and the theater role, us and the impacts of the hegemonic arms industry on (world) events, us and the people in the military conflict…

The indicated dichotomy between those who decide and speak about guns and those who use them comes chillingly to the fore towards the end of the performance. The assigned roles start becoming nebulous, disappearing under a “barrage of questions” aimed at the participants. “Raise your hand, whoever has held a gun in their hand;” “Raise your hand, whoever contributed money for arming the Ukrainian army.” In answering these general questions, the personal experiences, ideas, and positions of those present come to the fore. The performance then ends suddenly and indefinitely, which reflects this emotional ambiguity that accompanies the entire topic of the arms business.

Through this “refusal to finish” and close the experienced narrative, the performance creates tension between the position of the individual and the things they are powerless to control. We Love Shooting balances between humorous moments from seemingly distant spheres and a personal engagement that shows itself to be indispensable. It puts up barriers to adopting a clear standpoint, both in the sphere of the arms industry, as well as in the context of expectation and the sentiments through which we relate to the phenomenon. 

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8lidí and Jiří Žák / We Love Shooting / Galerie Display / 10–17 March 2023

Photo: Oskar Helcel