Virtues of Violence: A Testimonial Performance, or an Affidavit of Lies, Excuses, and Justifications

This is a performance of statements/records/made up lies. We collected testimonies that spoke of some of the violences that we are facing—from Greece and Turkey—but these glimpses of frustration, bruising, broken dreams are evident everywhere, with different masks and excuses: “neoliberalism”/“extremism”/“unionism.” All have the common suggestion: that this is how we play the game. The mediated moral panic about urban insurrections demonstrates how insidious representations of violence are at once everyday and ideologically driven. This text of a performance lecture offers an intimate, embodied consideration of the problem of violence and its representations. The texts from each city (Athens and Istanbul) became scripts for presenting and representing the ways public and private, nation and terror, Self and Other are negotiated. We investigated the nature of violence in protests in both cities with the aim of presenting the findings through performance.