The walls of fear

Fear is a social product. The circulation of discourse is essential to its creation. Fear spreads through images, stories, stereotypes, and fake newsThere is no fear without stories. The cultivation of fear depends on the imagination, especially on those who create prejudices. We think of racism and the creation of images of an always dangerous "other." Let's think of misogynistic discourses and the many fears they fuel. This association of symbolism and fear is inseparable from the institutions that have the power to articulate public discourse. Religious groups have always played a special role in the manipulation of fear. The same is true of newspapers, radio, and television and their participation in the creation of moral panics and fear of crime. However, today social media has taken the generation of fear to new dimensions. Rumors and gossip have reached unprecedented levels, while fake news New fears are spread and fueled. Countering fear also depends on stories, which will break or invalidate the narratives that proliferate fear.

Public space is one of the contexts in which fears and the imaginaries that fuel them are created, amplified, and combated. There is a symbiotic relationship between certain types of public space and fear. Walls, fences, cameras, alarms, surveillance technologies, and everything that for some constitutes justifiable space or architecture are often conceived as means of protecting against danger and creating security. In reality, they are also means of generating fear. Walls and fear complement each other; they engender each other. Moreover, they create public spaces characterized by intolerance and suspicion, by discrimination and segregation, by the reproduction of inequalities. Surveillance technologies and architectures exist wherever there is mobility, and it is necessary to regulate their circuits, distance some bodies, maintain distances, and assert privileges and status. But graffiti can also be painted on walls, and eventually, it can be thrown to the ground. Despite many existing regulations, young people on the outskirts of large cities constantly circulate and create all kinds of interventions in public space. Borders are always crossed, regardless of the investments made to monitor them. No matter how hard we try to keep public spaces empty, clean, and under control, the masses still take over the streets and parks every day, and quite often these are precisely the spaces that people occupy to protest, to break norms based on the manipulation of fear, and to overthrow oppressive regimes.

Muntadas has always been very attentive to the construction of fear and the types of public space that accompany it. In works such as Searches (Fences/rejas, 2008) or Alphaville and outros (2011) has exposed spaces created by surveillance technologies and, at the same time, has revealed the aesthetics of security and the systems of discrimination that these spaces engender. In Fear/Miedo (2005) and Fear/Jauf (2007), some very nice videos from the series On translation, explores different experiences and interpretations of fear on both sides of national walls. In his latest installation, Public place (2024), leads the viewer between large screens with videos of crowds and moving vehicles, inviting them to reflect on what it means publicHe has emphasized the open-mindedness of public space and the democratic government that accompanies it. His interventions engender the kind of narratives that help counter the fear and disruptions caused in public space by architectures that erect walls, borders, and separations.