On 23 January 1920, at the Palais des Fêtes in central Paris, Tristan Tzara, co-founder of the Dada movement, stepped onto the stage and performed a parliamentary speech by the French nationalist politician, Léon Daudet. Accompanied by the ringing of electric bells, the speech became almost impossible to hear. Words dissolved into noise, and the audience responded with hostility.
Daudet was a powerful political and cultural figure, and Tzara’s choice to re-perform his speech was provocative. Yet Tzara later claimed that the words spoken were irrelevant. What mattered, he suggested, was his presence on stage – his gestures, movements and the disruption they caused. For Erica, this moment reveals something fundamental about language, power and politics.
For the early twentieth-century avant-garde, language was ‘a public concern of the first importance’ (Hugo Ball). In the aftermath of war, words had proven capable of mobilising violence, legitimising destruction and producing authority. Dadaist performances responded by dislodging language from meaning; through sound poetry, nonsense songs and the deliberate breakdown of political rhetoric. Erica notes that these interventions exposed ‘the fallibility of language to communicate reason’ and questioned its authority as a vehicle for truth.
This concerns remains strikingly relevant today. Contemporary governance continues to rely heavily on language – on facts, evidence and communication, yet these are increasingly unstable.
‘If language is used to speak truth and deliver facts, which are unstable, then governance by linguistic communication is problematic. I offer that the interventions of the Dada movement are useful for thinking through how art allows us to contemplate fundamental structures of organised society.’
Central to the POLART project is the idea that interaction between artworks and audiences can function as a space for producing knowledge differently. Rather than treating art as an illustration or commentary, POLART explores how artistic practices actively shape how issues are perceived, felt and debated.
‘The project views the space between artworks and spectators as a site for the co-creation of new forms of knowledge’
Tzara’s performance is useful here because it did not respond to a political speech, it re-presented it. By relocating Daudet’s words from parliament to the stage, Tzara transformed a political object into an artistic one. Erica describes this gesture as a form of readymade, an object taken directly from the world and reframed through art. The readymade bypasses representation and instead redirects meaning through context.
A contemporary parallel can be found in Christoph Büchel’s Barca Nostra,exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2019. The work consists of the wreckage of a migrant boat that sank in 2015, killing most of its passengers. Büchel did not create an artwork about migration, he presented the material remains of migration itself. Framed within the art world, the object resists easy interpretation.
‘It is not art, yet it is framed by the mechanisms of art, and that tension forces the viewer to confront its political significance’
Both examples blur the boundary between art and policy. They raise questions rather than provide answers, exposing how social problems are constructed and represented. Erica notes that policy problems do not exist independently of how they are framed. Like policymakers, artists participate in shaping what becomes visible, sayable and thinkable.
Art, like policy, is concept made material. By considering artistic spaces as alternative sites of policy problematization, Erica suggests we can begin to see how art enables different ways of engaging with collective concerns, not by resolving problems but by re-articulating how they are understood.
Read Erica’s staff profile (link to bio)