Shared Spaces interviews Nicholas Mirzoeff, a leading contemporary theorist in the field of visual culture and active participant in the social movements that first appeared in 2011.

 

In November 2012, Nicholas Mirzoeff visited the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB), where he participated, together with other speakers, including Evgeny Morozov, James Curran, Leila Nachawati, Geert Lovink and Samuel Aranda, in the lecture cycle "Citizenship, Internet and Democracy" in which he gave a lecture titled "Something to See Here: Countervisuality, New Media and the Occupy Movement". Mirzoeff spoke with Shared spaces about the New York version of the movement. He says that the occupiers of Zucotti Park –which, as he reminds us, is privately owned as a result of a rather irregular and even “ugly” real-estate deal– once again laid the foundations for a sense of what is public. They somehow managed to take this public space beyond being a zone that people only passed through, transforming it into a place that “makes democracy possible”. He deliberately expresses it thus because he believes that we do not yet have a genuinely democratic system, although we do have a chance to construct it. Hence, he concludes by saying, “Occupy opened up the possibility of imagining how a true democracy might work”.