Black Baroque Interventionists

BLACK BAROQUE INTERVENTIONISTS

Black Baroque Interventionists is neither an organised movement, nor collective. Their approach is neither serious nor frivolous. They despise all hypocritical declarations of good and evil. The textbook dichotomy of optimism and pessimism, or beauty and ugliness, is absurd to all BBI members who had amputated their sentiments. Their experiments are not to be understood as science, their gestures not to be taken as art, their activities are never political, and their words have hardly anything to do with the notion named 'love'. To them, the necessity of such differentiation is as useless as the petit-bourgeois distinction between tiring labour and boring leisure.

Operating within a decentred structure, and sharing a common hatred of statistics, Black Baroque Interventionists could not establish an exact figure of those who are currently involved. To them, history and memory are overrated - none of the members remember the year they emerged. The practice of leaving no traces during their operations has resulted in the impossibility of presenting a chronology of their activities. Except for a few names shamelessly sold to the public by an affiliated art collective based in Singapore (which Black Baroque Interventionists has recently declared as an act of treason) none of the members are identifiable. According to a joint statement issued in Jan 2010, in the form of a cassette recording, 'We are not identical even to ourselves […] to hell with identity and personality! But we could be your politicians smiling on TV, the CEOs of every MNC and the cleaners of all the toilets in this filthy world! We are everyone and no one. […] All members affirm their participation by the relentless self-denial of their involvement in the group.'

In the Jan 2010 statement, Black Baroque Interventionists, as prime advocates of local anaesthetics, summarises their agenda with this quotation found in the jotter book of a member who went missing during an operation:

'Non-imperial [...]* must be as rigorous as a mathematical demonstration, as surprising as an ambush in the night, and as elevated as a star.'

*Illegible inkblot