Week 37: Internacional Errorista

Hi Everyone,

This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.

This week we’ll be talking with Federico Zukerfeld and Loreto Garin, two of the co-founders of the Internacional Errorista.

International Errorism was born fortuitously in 2005 when a bunch of artists and activists in Buenos Aires, planning to protest the visit of George W. Bush to Argentina, meant to google “terrorism” but mistakenly forgot the “t” and typed in “errorism”… At the time, that error yielded zero hits; it is some measure of the group’s success (or error) that today it elicits over 300,000! With their hybrid blend of carnivalesque street art and savvy, corrosive political analysis, the group hunts down and exposes the errors that pollute our global public sphere, which the powers-that-be generally try to fob off as “the Truth”.

Indeed, errorism is a full-fledged if highly heretic philosophy — one that stands opposed to the “verism” that informs virtually all other modes of thought and human endeavor. For rather than being based on a quest for an elusive “truth”, it sees error as the founding principle of life: errare humanum est! How wrong could that be?! Proceeding by trial, but more generally by error, they claim in their manifesto that “we are all errorists:”

  1. Errorism : Concept and action are based on the idea that “error” is reality’s principle of order.
  2. Errorism is a philosophically erroneous position, a ritual of negation, a disorganized organization: failure as perfection, error as appropriate move.
  3. The field of action of “Errorism” contains all those practices that aim at the LIBERATION of the human being and language.
  4. Confusion and surprise, black humour and absurdity are the favorite tools of the errorists.
  5. Lapses and failed acts are an errorist delight.

The movement itself emerged from an earlier collective called Etcetera, but has gone global! Is error a plausible (art)world?