David Powell – Zone Fever 2024
Freeports, Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and Charter Cities are variations on private governance, they are states within states, designated areas of extraterritorial regions carved out from the host countries laws and protections. SEZs are a way for corporations working with governments to bypass regulations and ultimately exit the ‘oppressive constraints’ and interventions of ‘Big Government’.
Across the world the most lucrative line of business is in corporate governance, this occurs when venture capitalists, libertarians, and oligarchs seek to implement ‘exit’ strategies from democracy and social governance. F.D.Roosevelt made a request to the public upon his election to the US Presidency, he said “You elected me, now tell me what you want and I’ll do it” this gave rise to the New Deal in 1933, a Social Contract that saw egalitarian economics, GDP saw a fair balance between wage share and profit share, as a result public healthcare, and social services flourished for the next 30-40 years.
During the 1950’s numerous right wing libertarian economists and anarcho-capitalists such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, James Buchanan, Antony Fisher, Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard were incensed at FDR’S New Deal, which they saw as ‘theft of property’ which placed democratic constraints on individual liberty along with otherwise unfettered capital accumulation.
A wave of r/w libertarian think tanks were formed throughout the 1950s, such as The Insitute of Economic Affairs, The Adam Smith Institute, Mont Pelerin, The Heritage Foundation, The Tax Payer Alliances, and hundreds of others, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman advised their fellow libertarians to never disclose their partisan ideology to the public as it would entail losing their charity status, along with their plans to usurp social democracy which would horrify the public. In 1981 Antony Fisher, founder of the IEA London (1955) formed an umbrella group of ‘thinks tanks that create think tanks’, it was named the ATLAS network, it has since been referred to as the ‘network of liberty’. Think tanks operate as parties within parties, they enjoy charity status yet are funded by dark money from big oil/tobacco/agri/pharma and tech, much of their research is never disclosed to the public and consequently emerging government policies comprise deep austerity, anti-climate change, anti-LGBTQ+, culture wars and anti-governance tactics that erode public services with decades of defunding.
Citizens in so-called representative democracies around the world have been reduced to being mere spectators of their own fate as a new hybrid of right-wing libertarian and anarcho-capitalist set out to dismantle democracy and the welfare state by installing corporate governance in patchwork zones of private sovereignties isolated away from the interventions of Big Government.
Special Economic Zones have a long history dating back to Roman times, they are also known as colonialist projects (notably by the British)such as the East India Company 1600, through to colonization of Hong Kong and Singapore in the mid 1800s, known as China’s ‘century of humiliation’.
Peter Thiel (Palantir, PayPal and billionaire Trump donor) was inspired by William Rees-Moggs 1997 book ‘The Sovereign Individual – How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State’ which predicted the arrival of Big Tech as a new form of (Techno) Feudalism, Thiel recognised that fragmenting regions into privately run zones would birth a ‘thousand nation states’ in dynamic competition with each other setting their own private laws replacing what Tom Bell described as negatively framed ‘statist’ laws.
SEZs and charter cities are fenced-in regions, corporate owned enclaves of extraterritorial space with their own private laws, customers (not citizens) have a ‘choice’ to opt in or out by way of a contract. Post-Brexit UK is currently undergoing zone fever, this began as a Tory initiative between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss who are responsible for the current setting up of 12 deregulated Freeports and 74 SEZs. This is on the back of 192 English councils threatened with bankruptcy, while scores of business, agricultural, and residential properties are facing mass compulsory purchase orders.
Since 2016 my research into SEZs and the libertarian ideology behing them has seen me become a political activist with a sizable following on Twitter X. I’m taking part in public speaking events throughout the UK hosted by independent journalists, and concerned citizens who are asking question about SEZs, Freeports and Charter Cities. Brexit is a time-based project, the transition phase to full-blown corporate governance has already laid its foundations in the form of 12 Freeports and 74 SEZs, backed by Labour MPs, Mayors, councillors, Lords, and Baronesses who were board members of Sunak and Truss’s nationwide SEZs/Freeports consortia.
Brexit has induced desperation by design, the UK is now ‘capital hungry’ and is letting go of democracy by allowing corporations to take up the mantle of governance where ‘democracy failed’. There is a concerted effort by the UK’s client Press to not report on what will become the biggest scandal of 21st century Britain. Brexit’s true purpose is to ensure capital accumulation is achieved as the public sector simultaneously atrophies through chronic underfunding, while the nation state’s laws and regulations are totally collapsed. Attacks on citizens’ protests will ramp up, targets will invariably be the ‘woke’ and LGBTQ+ communities, all those on the left, academics, writers, artists, intellectuals, and the independent press.
SEZs fragment local territories by ring-fencing them from the host country’s laws and protections. Collective sovereignty (people power) has been successfully targeted, sold off/commodified and is now being replaced with corporate sovereignty, and private governance.
Deregulated SEZs are primed to reconfigure each region of the UK by licensing the zones for 25 years, this is under ‘secondary legislation’ which emeans zero Parliamentary and public scrutiny. UK SEZs allow tax breaks to companies setting up inside them for 10 years.
It is no coincidence that Labour are members of Sunak and Truss’s nationwide Freeports/SEZ consortia. Our main parties are quick to wave the glossy brochures of Freeports and SEZs replete with the usual ‘growth, innovation, and lifting deprived areas out of poverty’ ad nauseam, but the truth is countries with low taxation and rampant deregulation reveal high levels of crime, frozen wages for ordinary working people, huge increases in wages for the rich and absolute government corruption, and political instability.
My political activism into free zones comprises speaking at public events across the UK raising awareness about the dangers of free zones coming to communities and residents entrapped within them. The more I got involved with political activism, the more it fed into my studio practice, this has seen material outcomes in my work move away from display into creating ‘live environments’ that fuse together raw materials, works in progress, and completed works. This makes for a situation of ‘collective viewing’, rather than singular viewing, something I connected with when I visited Brancusi’s reconstructed studio outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2023. With a fresh interchangeability of materials, it became clearer to me that a broader painterly based approach was needed, this approach rapidly expanded across a diverse range of materials and outcomes. As Daniel Buren wrote in his 1971 paper The Function of the Studio, ‘the studio is the purest site of creation’, what happens after work ‘exits’ the studio remains to this day deeply problematic. These are my attempts at materializing conversations between my own research and activism via continually unfolding contemporary political events, I examine their histories, their inception, and sustained movement towards the dismantling of global democracy. I would qualify my recent production as a reclaiming of the ‘gesamtkunstwerk’ as something to trigger speculations on the past, present and future, of upcoming borders and limits on our democracies via zone fever.
Band Paintings and Sculptures
The following text was written about about my work by Andrew Renton in 2019
It’s about a desire to possess things or capture them when you know the object of your gaze and desire cannot be grasped. It’s about fandom, which is an elevated form of identification, observation and even time travel.
These sources, collaged together like the back of your old school notebook insist that such imagery, in a digital age, is perpetually present, and belongs to all of us. A shared knowledge and collective ownership. And what does it mean to copy the already copied?
The artist can’t help his gaze. Not always a preliminary model towards a more fleshed out version, the drawing can also reclaim territory that has long been worked out, over-worked, even, and iconic. It rethinks its origins, putting the viewer back into the frame. It’s almost a readymade and comes with baggage. History brought into the present tense. It makes me think about what Kierkegaard said about repetition; that it was a kind of recollection forwards. And nothing less than an ethical engagement.
(And perhaps I should mention that the Fall are my favourite band of all time.) Andrew Renton 2019
– Since 2018 I’ve been making work about the British alternative music scene. Many of the bands I’m interested in were given a platform on John Peel’s radio show, if they got too famous he’d usually stop playing them, after all it was about giving exposure to unknown and new forms of music at the margins of the mainstream. My emotional connection with these bands began in my teens at a time when my only goals were to go to art school and see as many bands as possible.
Desire plays an enormous role in my work, years of going to concerts, feeling the build up of an electric atmosphere as I wait for the band to come on stage, the objects of my desire forever just out of reach. My identity was shaped by these experiences and unconventional sounds that flourished in the independent music scene . Art is a kind of time travel, fandom a perpetual state of collective identification and joy. At it’s core my work explores collective memory while embracing social dynamics that strives to bring different audiences together.
The Flower Paintings
Many years ago Jean Luc Godard referred to flowers on the periphery of highways as ‘roadside refugees’. In 2013 I began to replace human figures in my compositions with flowers and plants, it was a necessary move to reclaim a painterly space that was predominantly populated by centuries of representations of humans beings in painting, a kind of urgency that brought more pressing issues of climate change and survival, the social context filtered through parallel worlds, of hope and raising awareness via different channels.