all watched over
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All Watched Over is a camouflaged interior as an impulsing artifact of data and images cultivated by the political exiles. The interior readapts the theatre and parliament typologies to exchange and circulate visual and linguistic elements in the digital age, while the exterior envelope employs strategies to trick the surveillance gaze for granting digital anonymity.
With the spread of surveillance technologies human to human vision transforms into machine-to-machine vision, resulting in great control for repressive. It is alarming since media is the commodity that regulates our social interactions. The skin color, gestures, sexual orientation, and protest movements are recorded in public spaces against communities. Under the light of discriminatory body politics, we trace an intellectual flow of academics, writers, poets, playwrights, artists, and activists from east to west, specifically from Middle Eastern countries to three large capitals London, Paris, and Berlin. Berlin is unique for attracting most of the flow. In the 30 km north of Berlin, an underground bunker is occasionally occupied in a dense forest. The project extends the bunker into a repository of counter-narratives hosting the individuals whose lives revolve around producing political commentaries and threatened because of this fact.
There are two different cycles within spaces. Data management and theatre feed each other through debates and curatorial practices. The first cycle happens permanently. The artists,
journalists, and researchers reside shortly and produce together in the debate chambers. The data is transformed into virtual spectacles on the second cycle to meet with the people out of this seclusion. The happenings are temporary at particular times. The theatre is physical, and the medium is virtual. It is a wild electronic data landscape of the fiction and inhabited stories.
The interior is lightly covered by the veil of anonymity that blurs and pixelates. The power of the digital age is to be able to be invisible, going off the grid. The veil is doing that by creating a fuzzy appearance of bodies. Another type of camouflage, like the bunker, hides from the camera lens, making undetectable.
To sum up, the building emerges in the shadows of the decaying nuclear bunker in Berlin, becomes an optical and political apparatus inhabited by liberated bodies, as a result, creating the intimate landscapes of reflections and playful spectacles.