Take Your Desires for Realities: Projection and Political Imagination

May 1968. Paris is engulfed in a vast wave of violent protests in which a heterogeneous mass of people collectively challenges the ruling power, producing an extremely important and well-studied upheaval. Regardless of the specific social and cultural reasons behind this uprising, which was rooted in precise elements of French society, what is striking about the Parisian May has been its ability to become the echo chamber for a much wider set of problems, at the intersection between conservative politics (emblematically embodied by the figure of Charles de Gaulle), colonialist-imperialist mentality, and cultural alienation. It has been convincingly shown that the Parisian revolt was fought not just in the realm of politics and ideological confrontation, but also through the use of images and texts,¹Audrey Leblanc, Dominique Versavel (sous la direction de), Icônes de mai 68. Les images ont histoire (Paris: Editions de la BnF, 2018). See also Wolfgang Scheppe, Taxonomy of the Barricade: Image Acts of Political Authority in May 1968 (Milan: NERO Editions, 2021). producing an extremely modern aesthetic rupture within the political regime, to adopt a Rancièrean perspective.²Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000). 

One of the most distinctive ways in which this revolt has been memorialized has to do with mural writings, short and evocative slogans through which students and workers tried to materialize their requests and express their discomfort with the status quo.³For an archeology of this gesture, see: Béatrice Fraenkel, Magali Gouiran, Nathalie Jakobowicz, and Valérie Tesnière, Affiche-Action. Quand la politique s’ècrit dans la rue (Paris: Gallimard, 2012). An image published in the 999^th issue of Paris Match, which appeared on June 29, 1968, seems to perfectly emblematize this kind of graphic and visual appropriation of institutional spaces. In this fascinating picture, shot with a very pictorial high-angle shot, the reporter is situated on a ladder, and frames a corridor at the Université de la Sorbonne (one of the places where the confrontation between students and authorities was more virulent). Here we see a group of young people passing by, while we can distinctly read on the wall what the caption labels as a “surrealist slogan”: “Prenez vos desirs pour des realites” (sic!; “Take your desires for realities”).

Let’s make an acrobatic jump into the future and land in the twenty-first century. The tragic death of George Floyd, an African American brutally killed by police officers regardless of his continuous pleas for help (his tragic last words “I can’t breathe” soon became a crucial political slogan), generated a vast wave of collective rage that reignited the Black Lives Matter movement, also thanks to the proliferation of visual artifacts that variously reappropriated a set of recurring iconic images.⁴Mary Louisa Cappelli, “Black Lives Matter: The Emotional and Racial Dynamic of the George Floyd Protests Graffiti,” Advances in Applied Sociology 9, no. 10 (2020): 323–347; Holly S. Cowart, Ginger E. Blackstone, and Jeffrey K. Rilley, “Framing a Movement. Media Portrayals of the George Floyd Protests on Twitter,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 99, no. 3 (2022): 676–695. One of the most visible and distinctive forms of protest that BLM mobilized in the aesthetic field had to do with the contestation of monuments: through vandalization, creative appropriation or physical removal, the historical narrative mineralized in those stone or marble figures was put into question and judged guilty of erasing any space for the memory of racial (but also ethnic, class, etc.) subalterns.⁵On the issue of monument contestation: Bertrand Tillier, La disgrâce des statues. Essai sur les conflicts de memoire, de la Révolution française à Black Lives Matter (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2022); Emanuele Rinaldo Meschini, Come leggere un monumento o la sua rimozione (Milan: Postmedia, 2023); Andrea Pinotti, Nonumento. Un paradosso della memoria (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2023). 

The complexities of these gestures have been explored in detail by Valerio Ciriaci’s film Stonebreakers (2022), which adopts an observational perspective to chronicle the last year of Donald Trump’s first presidential term, focusing on the topics of memory and historical monumentalization. A large part of the film is devoted to the issue of Native Americans’ request for “land back” and it is precisely in this context that the issue of projection-based activism is presented. In a very powerful scene, we see a group of activists projecting a series of messages on a prison’s wall, while directly addressing the incarcerated people inside with a megaphone: “Do you hear us inside of there? We came together, your relatives, to stand with you”. This form of peaceful contestation is designed as the opening act of a more virulent and physical opposition to the upcoming visit of President Trump to celebrate Independence Day at Mount Rushmore: the projected writings (e.g., “You are on stolen land; Trump; Mount Rushmore; White Supremacy”), variously emblematize the requests of these activists to be recognized and to reclaim what they have been robbed of, and thus have a clear and immediate political content. 

Anachronisms and desires

There are, of course, striking differences between the two examples briefly discussed above. Besides the self-evident chronological distance, there is also a completely different social context at stake, and the reasons motivating the struggle are heterogeneous to say the least. Even from the point of view of media devices we are seemingly in a very different situation, writing being an archetypical gesture, while the type of visual activism depicted in Stonebreakers is made possible by the digital encoding of moving images and by the possibility it enables of relocating the coordinates of projection experiences.⁶Andy Buchanan, “Projection Art and Projection Activism,” Architecture_MPS 20, no.1 (2021): 1–11; on the concept of relocation: Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy.

Approaching uprisings from the point of view of visual studies, as recent scholarship has shown,⁷See Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Martin Klimke, Joachim Scharloth (eds.), Protest Culture: A Companion (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2020); Adrian McGarry, Itir Erhart, Hande Eslen-Ziya, Olu Jenzen, Umut Korkut (eds.), The Aesthetics of Global Protest: Visual Culture and Communication (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). enables us to sketch new analytical possibilities, based on the assumption that the temporality of revolts is necessarily inhabited by forms of anachronism and afterlives.⁸Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps. Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2000); Georges Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). In this sense, we can address the examples described above as two different, but not so dissimilar, ways of giving form to a specific political urgency, which — regardless of its peculiar characteristics — aims to reshape the coordinates of what we call political. In other words, when the ruling power produces a segmentation of the sensible that deliberately cuts out entire parts of civil society, the disenfranchised collectivity (re-)discovers itself to be an active political force and actively engages in an effort of communal reclaiming.⁹Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2015); Paul B. Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi (Paris: Grasset, 2022). 

How can we describe this force that inexplicably brings together different people, that mysteriously makes them overcome their own inevitable divisions and makes them willing to engage in a common effort, even at the risk of being severely beaten (like the Paris students) or ultimately killed (like George Floyd and many other African Americans)? Perhaps one of the best categories to describe this energy is that of desire, a kind of utopian impulse that is paradoxically much more powerful in all the cases in which the actual possibility of engaging in active politics is frustrated. In this regard, what Vera Bertolino and Francesco Copellotti noted while re-reading Bloch’s influential The Spirit of Utopia, seems particularly relevant here: “In our culture, the space for a book like The Spirit of Utopia, seems non-existent. But is precisely for this reason that it is infinitely powerful: a shouting ground zero, the cry of pain and vengeance.”¹⁰Vera Bertolino and Francesco Coppellotti, “Ernst Bloch negli anni Settanta,” in Ernst Bloch, Spirito dell’utopia (Milan: Rizzoli, 2004): 450 (our translation). It is, in other words, in the darkest times, at the historical junctures when abusive ruling powers determine the impossibility of engaging in institutionalized politics, that the ever-resurgent desire arises to reclaim what is, by definition, interpersonal and communal.¹¹Cf. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London: Penguin Books, 2005); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

Projection activism and political imagination

By interpreting the idea of activism under the category of desire, we are urged to question the specific role of the aforementioned practices of writing and projection, which, in this sense, would be united by the identical desire to give tangibility to a collective political energy. What they have in common, in other words, is the temporality towards which they are directed: the future – imminent or not, depending on the context – that the act of uprising is supposed to bring into being. Therefore, to perform an act of revolt is to foresee (and seek) a different temporality that lies beyond the status quo, to promote a disruption of the present, and thus to bend the linear temporality in unplanned directions. It has been argued elsewhere that visual practices have a peculiar capacity to make this entangled and temporal dimension finally visible and the case of projection activism is no exception.¹²Giuseppe Previtali, “Dal ponte del Potëmkin. Il tempo anacronistico delle immagini in rivolta,” Fata Morgana 52 (2024): 215–221. 

Let’s go back to the projection sequence depicted in Stonebreakers and ask ourselves what is going on there from a political point of view. What kind of process is taking place around the act of projection, or maybe precisely thanks to it? The beam of light that breaks through the darkness (of the night, but also symbolically of the status quo) transforms the external wall of the detention facility into a screening surface, thus enabling strong words of accusation to appear. This rather simple action has a number of consequences, such as triggering a peculiar “site-specific” metonymic process in which “the physical building stands symbolically for the key occupant”.¹³Andy Buchanan, “Projection art and projection activism,” Architecture_MPS 20, n.1 (2021): 1–11; on the concept of relocation: Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). In this sense, projecting words related to the “land back” movement onto a federal prison means questioning the legitimacy of an incarcerating power that locks up activists who question the legitimacy of a historical narrative.

This example of projection activism generates a direct link between the people bravely standing outside the prison and the detainees who are filmed banging their fists on the windows to let us the activists know that they are listening. In this sense, the projection creates a connection, a relationship that reinforces the existing link between those outside and those inside (it is clearly stated in the voiceover that at least some of these activists are relatives of the prisoners). Abstracting from this specific example, we can argue more generally that projection activism is relevant precisely because of its capacity to create an unprecedented connection between someone who is present, in situ, and someone who is not there (because they are somewhere else, they see the images of the act and are somehow touched by them). The dialectical tension between the present and the absent has already been addressed as one of the crucial dimensions of contemporary mobilizations, and in the case of projection activism it becomes even more evident, because the idea of “throwing forward” which is somehow still inscribed in the word despite of its mathematical/geometrical meaning lets us see that the insurgent effort is directed towards someone or something that is not yet there. 

Francesco Casetti has recently defined the “projection/protection complex”; according to him, contemporary screen media are the outcome of “a set of interrelated processes and components … aimed at creating a protected confrontation with the world and at the same time at protecting individuals beyond the safe space in which they are located.”¹⁴Francesco Casetti, Screening Fears: On Protective Media (New York: Zone Books, 2023), 14. Without going into depth in Casetti’s sophisticated line of inquiry, what is relevant here is that this mechanism, deeply intertwined with modernity, emerges to “respond to a world that is perceived as increasingly difficult and taxing with technologies that make available new forms of confrontation.”¹⁵Francesco Casetti, Screening Fears: On Protective Media (New York: Zone Books, 2023), 14. In this sense, screen media play a crucial role in the “domestication” of the many anxieties variously connected with modernity, providing means to confront them in a safer environment. 

Casetti does not embark on any direct attempt to produce a political interpretation of the projection/protection complex, but his argument can nevertheless provide an interesting lens through which to view contemporary activism. The most significant shift that is needed to adapt this theory to our objects of inquiry is to question the category of protection. Those actively engaging in projection activism do not seek protection, but are rather using the structural elements of the complex (a projector, a pseudo-screen surface, etc.) to express their discomfort towards the current political context. It is not, therefore, an issue of being protected from something, but to find words to denounce the conditions in which someone (that may be us as well as someone else) is currently (or has been) living. 

In this sense, projection does not work as a tool for coping with subalternity and marginalization, but rather as an instrument to produce and reinforce attempts to change reality. If for Casetti, the complex has the function of making the confrontation with the real world less traumatic, here it is rather an attempt to radicalize this same tension, by providing the insurgents with a tool to focalize their claims. Compared to other forms of collective activism,¹⁶See Lynne Segal, Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy (London: Verso, 2017). the use of projection seems peculiarly focused on denouncing the contradictions in which we live, making them visible and speakable in the political space. The use of projected writing to speak of (or for, depending on the situation) a mass of voiceless people systematically excluded by the political regime of visibility is thus a subversive act in itself, one which dismantles the continuity of our aesthetic field and promotes the emergence of a new (and necessarily fragile and transient) space of appearance.¹⁷The concept is here used in the sense outlined by Hannah Arendt: “The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government […]. Its peculiarity is that […] it does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being.” The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 199.

If, as Henri Lefebvre argues, what we call public space is made public through a process that is political, then subversive actions attempting to rewrite the segmentation of the public are a constitutive part of any form of space-making processes.¹⁸Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford-Malden: Blackwell, 1996), 61–181. Among these actions, projection activism seems to be particularly efficient in favouring the coming together of a potentially heterogeneous and disenfranchised mass of individuals, and in promoting awareness of crucial political issues, thanks to the proliferation of digital images of each action in the digital mediascape. Although categories such as “hashtag activism,”¹⁹See Diana Zulli, “Evaluating Hashtag Activism: Examining the Theoretical Challenges and Opportunities of #BlackLivesMatter”, Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies 17, no. 1 (2020): 197–216. which seem to imply the possibility of an exclusively online and screen-mediated mobilization, often risk sounding rather naïve, the capacity to film, photograph, and subsequently share the outcomes of projection activism is a constitutive part of its popularity as a strategy.

Projection thus becomes a tool, both for those who are present and for those who witness it in mediated forms, to create a space of apparition where new political configurations can emerge and where everyone is invited to take part and to take a stand. Coming together therefore means experimenting with different forms of action, engaging in a process that urges us to imagine the world we want to create — the reality that we want to build not only for ourselves, but for the many who will come after us as well as for those who do not yet have the right to act. All of this can, and should, materialize around a ray of light, bravely projected in the face of power.

Coda – Heil Tesla

During the last US presidential inauguration, Elon Musk’s Roman salute provoked widespread condemnation and was widely perceived as a questionable way to inaugurate a mandate that has already been marked by a large number of conservative and problematic decisions. Musk quickly dismantled the all-too-obvious fascist legacy of the gesture as a “tired dirty trick.”²⁰George Wright, “Musk responds to backlash over gesture at Trump rally”, BBC.com, January 21, 2025 (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy48v1x4dv4o; last access: 24 January 2025). A couple of days later, a group of German activists projected the infamous pose onto the wall of a Tesla factory just outside Berlin. Activists from Das Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (The Center for Political Beauty) were quick to take credit for this maneuver, pointing out their desire to participate in what they defined as Musk’s aesthetic destruction.²¹The image is visible, alongside with other related materials, on the BlueSky profile of the collective: https://bsky.app/profile/politicalbeauty.bsky.social (last accessed: 24 January 2025). Although it is difficult to foresee the political development of the next few years, people will continue to gather around rays of light and to build new political connections in the face of power, bravely asserting the desire to change the future. 

Giuseppe Previtali

Giuseppe Previtali is Assistant Professor at the University of Bergamo, where he teaches Film and Visual Studies. His research is focused on the extreme forms of contemporary visuality, with a specific focus on image politics in conflict contexts. He co-edited a special issue of Cinéma & Cie on uprisings and he is the author of various books, such as L’ultimo tabù. Filmare la morte fra spettacolarizzazione e politica dello sguardo (Meltemi, 2020).