Or perhaps the more appropriate question would be: what are you afraid of? Because there are few emotions like the fear of being so equal and so clearly reminded of our true human measure. From the fear of the dark, of monsters, or of separation from your mother, to pain, loneliness, or the death of those you love and who know who you truly are. Fears visit us throughout life like ghosts that take the most varied forms of loss. Violence, losing your home or job, or dignity; outliving a child or a loved one. All of this upsets us in a way that squeezes our hearts hard, almost physically.
Great philosophers and artists have spoken about and observed fear and anguish, and every era has had its monsters, which in essence vary little throughout history.
Fear paralyzes but also makes us escape, and it does so not only as an individual emotion, but as a force that helps mark the course of personal and collective history. From ancient societies to the present, fear has been used by religious and political powers to maintain social control, but at the same time it has served as an engine of resistance and collective change. In the Middle Ages, the Black Death and fear of the gods determined the way of life and consolidated the power of the Church. During the French Revolution, the Terror highlighted the dual nature of fear, capable of sustaining both repression and transformation. In the 20th century, world wars, the Cold War, and epidemics like HIV created climates of shared fear. In this 21st century, fear takes on new, more diffuse and global forms: terrorism, the climate crisis, pandemics, and digital threats generate a feeling of permanent insecurity. We don't know what to expect, and we are afraid of the uncertainty that increasingly grips more areas of our lives.
The current acceleration, the breakdown of the norms by which the world operated, a technology that surpasses us, networks that only connect us with those we like, and algorithms that only confirm our biases... All of this fuels our fears. We have become a society of fear, where risks are often invisible or abstract, and only by understanding their genealogy can we avoid falling victim. If fear has been one of the great driving forces of human history, our opportunity is to learn to recognize and govern it, so that it serves to strengthen resistance and democracy instead of destroying them.
A PROJECT BETWEEN ARTIST AND JOURNALISTS
Fear is precisely the theme that the artist Antoni Muntadas proposed to us to work on with ARA for the special author's diary that we are publishing today. He, who has carried out one of his artistic projects, always developed on the road, whether in the US, Venezuela, Jordan, Morocco, China, or Europe. Muntadas is an experimental artist and former professor at MIT who is interested in social and political issues and in communication and the media. Today, he continues to conduct fieldwork, with interviews and conversations using a sociological method that ultimately transforms into a project that eventually closes for exhibition. Muntadas listens and then considers the format he wants to convey, and his project ends up in the form of a video, installation, or publication—in other words, in a format that helps understand the message. In this case, the project culminates in a unique, authorial diary, curated by the diary editors, coordinated and inspired by the experience and sensitivity of the art expert deputy director, Catalina Serra, and with the collaboration of MACBA. Once again, this is a unique diary that is thanks to the generosity and complicity of the artists with whom we have worked. As Muntadas says, "we have to learn something from everything we do." And so it has been in this process, which has brought new situations, created during the dialogue with reality and with the artist.
Muntadas has looked very closely at the media, the media landscape, since he settled in New York in 1971 and went from black and white Spanish television to the media bombardment of the United States. For him, objectivity does not exist, and he makes us think about critical subjectivity.
We have talked about fear in all the sections, we have explained the news of the day, and the artist has performed "acupuncture on the image to fix it, emphasize a word to give it presence."
Antoni Muntadas has been encouraging people to "look, see, perceive" for years. A newspaper with readers trying to understand reality becomes an ideal medium for his proposal.
