The artwork Social Kiosk: The New Text Art of and Making Books a Difference by Ulises Carrión Freee was commissioned by RADAR Arts for ‘For & Against: Art, Politics and the Pamphlet’. The event took place on 26 & 27 May 2017 in Loughborough, UK.

Social Kiosk and The New Text Art of and Making Books a Difference by Ulises Carrión Freee is a designed as a temporary public locus in which to disseminate badges and manifestos. The artwork is part-public structure, part-kiosk and part-publishing laboratory. The research focus in this project was on the role of the manifesto. Therefore, the project enabled us to experiment with how the manifesto operates beyond constative utterance, aiming to shift language and statement towards performative utterances. The aim is to use language and action in an artwork; the result is that the work does not only describe a given reality, but attempts to also changes the social reality that the words are describing.

A manifesto, does not give an account of oneself, but gives an account of the social and political situation of the time. It is not a description, though: it makes declarations, proclamations, pronouncements, announcements and it sets forward a programme. Manifestos are not performative language in the classic sense: it is not the words themselves that effect change. Manifestos call for action. Language is essential to this transformative activity but it is not the action itself and cannot take its place. Manifestos light the fire but the bodies of the politically engaged are its social agents. In one sense, manifestos do nothing at least not by themselves, but in another sense - in which what we say is tied to what we do - manifestos are essential to the collective action of social change.