About the Event:
The storms in Berlin of the Reichstag in August 2020, the US Capitol in January 2021 and the Brazilian Congress in January 2023 were violent attempts to overthrow or challenge democratically elected governments. While the three events failed to achieve their purported aim, they have entered our collective memories and shaped the ways we perceive the present and the future of democracy. Broadcast on the stage of a globally networked public sphere, they have produced what the art historian Aby Warburg has aptly called Schlagbilder, images that have the power to synthesize and intervene in a political situation.
By focusing on synthesising images of the storms in Berlin and Brasília, I will show how their capacity to become politically operative results from their unique association between elements that are at once recognizable and unsettling. While scholars have concentrated on the symbolic outlook and performative aims of the political actors, I will discuss how the storms drew on key elements of the modern democratic imaginary to stage the clash between the rebelling crowd and the established political order. By shifting attention to specific aspects of the built structures and the revolting people, I shall argue that the storms call into question the relationship between form, time and democratic power.
About the Speaker:
Luciana Villas Bôas is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and at the Graduate Program of German Studies at the University of São Paulo.
