265
*  Department of Arts and Humanities, Brunel University London, UK
 katerina.paramana@brunel.ac.uk | orcid.org/0000-0002-1595-7118
Katerina Paramana*
The Oscillation of Contemporary Bodies between 
Biopolitics and Necropolitics: Tania Bruguera’s 
Wrestling with Power Structures
1
Keywords
performance, political economy, necropolitics, biopolitics, Cuba, Tate Modern, Tatlin’s 
Whisper
Abstract
The article examines Tania Bruguera’s works 10,148,451 (2019, Tate Modern, UK) and the 
three versions of Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (2009 and 2014, Havana; 2015, Tate Modern). Think -
ing with Achille Mbembe’s work on necropolitics, Lauren Berlant’s on “slow death,” and 
Michel Foucault’s on biopolitics, Paramana suggests that 10,148,451 addresses the collec-
tive subject and critiques contemporary necropolitics, while the versions of Tatlin’s Whis-
per #6 address individuals as political subjects, and comment on the panoptic gaze and 
contemporary biopolitics. Through her analysis of these works, Paramana shows how 
Bruguera’s work is created to comment on the specific political economies in which it is 
presented, how the perception of the work’s politics differs when presented in different 
political economies, and the insights therefore the work might offer to them. Paramana 
argues that Bruguera’s work has often achieved more than local and national govern-
ments and that her “symbolic work with activist parameters” is surprisingly more effi-
cacious than her activist work. The article concludes with the insights Bruguera’s work 
offers for the future of bodies in the 21st century.
1
1 
This research has been funded by the BRIEF Research Award (“Brunel Research Initiative 
and Enterprise Fund”) 2019–20, Brunel University London.
Filozofski vestnik
issn 0353-4510 | Volume 44 | Number 2 | 2023 | 265–85
cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.44.2.12

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katerina paramana
Oscilacija sodobnih teles med biopolitiko in nekropolitiko: 
spopad Tanie Bruguera s strukturami moči
Ključne besede
performans, politična ekonomija, nekropolitika, biopolitika, Kuba, Tate Modern, 
Tatlinov šepet
Povzetek 
Članek obravnava umetniška dela Tanie Bruguera, 10,148,451 (2019, Tate Modern, VB) in 
tri različice Tatlinovega šepeta #6 (2009 in 2014, Havana; 2015, Tate Modern). Paramana 
se sklicuje na nekropolitiko Achilla Mbembeja, »počasno umiranje« Lauren Berlant in bi-
opolitiko Michela Foucaulta ter trdi, da umetniško delo 10,148,451 govori o kolektivnem 
subjektu ter kritizira sodobno nekropolitiko, medtem ko različice dela Tatlinov šepet #6 
naslavljajo posameznike kot politične subjekte ter povežejo panoptični pogled in sodob-
no biopolitiko. Avtorica z analizo pokaže, da je umetniško delo Tanie Bruguera ustvarjeno 
tako, da se spoprime s specifičnimi političnimi ekonomijami, v katerih je predstavljeno, 
z dojemanjem političnosti dela in razlikami, ko je to predstavljeno v različnih političnih 
ekonomijah, ter s spoznanji, ki jih delo ponuja tem različnim ekonomijam. Dela Tanie 
Bruguera pogosto dosežejo več kot le lokalne in nacionalne vlade, njeno »simbolno delo 
z aktivističnimi parametri« pa je presenetljivo učinkovitejše od njenega aktivističnega 
dela. Bruguerina umetnost zatorej ponuja vpogled v prihodnost telesa v 21. stoletju.
∞
Introduction
Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera has been creating politically situated 
works for decades, ranging from performance to community work. Her works 
are intended to function as “useful tools” for a collective movement,
2
 re-estab-
lish “aesthetics as a system of transformation” by having ethics at their core 
(“est-ética”),
3
 and present situations that challenge spectators to become active 
citizens who question and unlearn normative behaviors (Arte de Conducta [Be-
2 
Lucía Sanromán and Susie Kantor, “Transitional Institutions and the Art of Political 
Timing-Specificity,” in Tania Bruguera: Talking to Power / Hablándole al Poder, ed. Lucía 
Sanromán and Susie Kantor (San Franscisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2018), 19.
3 
Sanromán and Kantor, 26.

267
the oscillation of contemporary bodies between biopolitics and necropolitics
havioral Art]).
4
 Her activism is put into practice through her long-term, ongoing 
projects such as YoTambenExijo (2014–ongoing) and Immigrant Movement In -
ternational (IMI, 2010–ongoing). And what I will refer to as her “symbolic work 
with activist parameters” (such as the works discussed here) not only operate at 
the level of the symbolic but is also linked to actions that have concrete effects 
for its participants. Bruguera’s work has always been politically positioned in 
its economies of creation and presentation, critiquing institutions, power struc-
tures (including the Cuban government), and the ways in which contemporary 
bodies oscillate in “the field of tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics.”
In this article, I discuss Bruguera’s works 10,148,451 (2019), a Hyundai commis-
sion presented at Tate Modern, and the three versions of Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (now 
part of YoTambenExijo, 2014–ongoing): the Havana 2009 and 2014 versions and 
the Tate Modern 2015 version. Thinking with Achille Mbembe’s work on necropo -
litics, Lauren Berlant’s work on “slow death,” and Michel Foucault’s writing on 
biopolitics, I propose that 10,148,451 addresses the collective subject and critiques 
contemporary necropolitics, while the works Tatlin’s Whisper #6, in contrast, ad-
dress individuals as political subjects and comment on the panoptic gaze and 
contemporary biopolitics. Through my analysis of 10,148,451 and Tatlin’s Whisper 
#6, I show how Bruguera’s work is created to comment on the specific political 
economies in which it is presented, how perceptions of the work’s politics differ 
when it is presented in different political economies, and what insights the work 
might therefore offer to these economies. By examining these artworks as econ-
omies in themselves which are situated within larger economies, I argue that, 
through her artwork, Bruguera has often done more work than local and national 
governments, though this often goes unnoticed (and at the same time one could 
argue that she lets these governments off the hook to some extent by doing the 
work for them). Finally, I propose that her “symbolic work with activist parame-
ters” (i.e., work that functions at the level of the symbolic but is linked to actions 
that have concrete effects for its participants—as with the works discussed here) 
is surprisingly more efficacious than her activist work. I conclude with the in-
sights that Bruguera’s work offers for the future of the bodies in the 21st century.
4 
Sanromán and Kantor, 25. See also Andrés David Montenegro Rosero, “Arte de Conducta: 
On Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper Series,” in Rhetoric, Social Value and the Arts: But 
How Does it Work?, ed. Charlotte Bonham-Carter and Nicola Mann (London: Palgrave 
Macmillan, 2017), 85–106.

268
katerina paramana
On Crises, “Slow Death, ” and Collective Efforts: Tania Bruguera’s 
10,148,451 (2019)
I am recalling this performance long after I experienced it. Although my visual 
memory of the work has somewhat faded, the nagging feeling that followed my 
experience of it, given my knowledge and appreciation of Bruguera’s politically 
and often sensorially provocative work, demanded that I return to the perfor-
mance to deal with what remained unresolved. After the performance ended, I 
kept thinking that I should have liked it more. Why did this work fail to appeal 
to me politically and aesthetically? And why can I not accept that perhaps it was 
an unsuccessful work and instead return to it as if I had missed something that 
happened in it, as if I just had not figured it out? The work insists upon my return.
On the day, upon my entrance into Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, I noticed the en-
tire floor of the Hall was covered with black, soft, shiny tiles. I walked across the 
Turbine balcony to the bridge to view the work from above. Several people were 
casually sitting or lying on the floor. There did not seem to be much going on. As 
I walked down the stairs and entered the main space of the work, I noticed the 
effect of other people’s bodies on the floor when they moved—imprints of their 
bodies were left on the floor, traces of them having been there. I realized that I 
could do the same if I took off my shoes. I found out later that the floor was coat -
ed with thermochromic ink, activated by the visitors’ body heat on contact. The 
press release and a text on a wall nearby provided some information about the 
work and its three parts:
In response to the crisis in migration, Bruguera has focused on the status of 
the neighbour and what it means to act and interact locally. She invites visitors 
to take part in symbolic actions in the Turbine Hall, from revealing a portrait 
of a person’s face hidden beneath a heat-sensitive floor, to crying under the 
influence of an organic compound. She has also worked with Tate Modern’s 
neighbours to create direct action: institutional changes that include renaming 
part of the museum itself. [. . .] In an age when the 24-hour news cycle presents 
migration as a never-ending crisis beyond our control, Bruguera also wants to 
break down our emotional barriers to combat apathy.
5
5 
“Hyundai Commission: Tania Bruguera: 10,142,926,” Press Release, Tate Modern, October 1, 
2018. https://www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases/hyundai-commission-tania-bruguera- 

269
the oscillation of contemporary bodies between biopolitics and necropolitics
The press release also informed the visitors that the portrait of Yousef, a young 
man with a migrant background who left Syria in 2011, would appear if every-
one laid down on the ground for a sufficient amount of time. However, it became 
clear that this would not happen—the visitors were in “picnic mode.” I decided 
to look at the second of the three parts of the work, which was in a room adja-
cent to the Turbine Hall. As I entered, my hand was stamped red with the num-
ber 10,143,837, which indicated the number of people who migrated from one 
country to another between January 1, 2017 and December 21, 2017 , added to the 
number of migrant deaths recorded up to that date according to the institute of 
migration’s Missing Migrant Project.
6
 As I entered the room, the few visitors al-
ready in it seemed to be chatting. The lighting was normal, and I do not recall 
any noise emanating from the work—no attempt was made to create a mystery or 
mood. However, a strong smell of menthol filled the room. Soon I felt the effect 
of the organic compound responsible for the smell; my eyes began to burn, and 
tears ran down my face. The artificial tears, according to the artist, were meant 
to evoke “forced empathy” in order to question whether we can “relearn to feel 
for others again.”
7
 The artist seemed to want to jolt us into action. However, the 
effort seemed to have been made in vain.
I remember finding the work weakly directed, to a great extent because the rela-
tionship of its three parts was not sufficiently visible. I also thought that even if 
only part of the work was more affective, this affect would function as the work’s 
organizational principle, which would address some of its dramaturgical issues. 
Despite the tears shed, I felt that the artwork lacked an affective anchor.
The work’s relationship to Tate Neighbours as the third space/part of the work 
offered some conceptual strength. This relationship was first revealed through 
the artist’s text. However, it was only solidified if the visitor connected to the Wi-
Fi and read about the call to action in the Tate Neighbours manifesto and the re-
naming of the Boiler House to “Natalie Bell.” Natalie Bell is a community activ-
ist who is involved with the charity “SE1 United” and worked at Coin Street Com-
munity Builders, which provides youth-led programmes for local youth. She is 
10142926.
6 
Tate Modern, “Tania Bruguera: 10,142,926”; Catherine Wood, ed., Hyundai Commission: 
Tania Bruguera (London: Tate Publishing, 2019).
7 
Tania Bruguera, “Tania Bruguera | Hyundai Commission | Tate,” YouTube video, uploaded 
by Tate, January 18, 2019, 5:51, https://youtu.be/7reNkai8H0I.

270
katerina paramana
also the person who chose Yousef for the work’s portrait and became a member 
of Tate Modern’s Advisory Council.
8
 The text of Tate Neighbours read:
Drawing on the “Terms and Conditions” document written by the Tate Neighbours, 
which can be accessed when logging on to the Tate WiFi network, Our Neighbours 
asks visitors to Tate Modern to actively engage with the lives of our neighbours and 
to commit to a neighbourly action wherever they have come from or where they 
live now. The programme seeks to revive collective social responsibility and com-
mon purpose through deliberation and public commitments.
9
This was 10,049,848, the title of Bruguera’s 2019 Hyundai commission at the Tate 
Modern on opening day (10,143,837 the minute I entered the “crying room”), re-
ferred on the Tate website as 10,148,451. Given the intention of the work and my 
experience of it, I felt let down. Not only did the visitor have to have a great deal 
of context to appreciate the work, but several people had to act to fully experi-
ence it: enough people had to lie down for others to see the painting. This also 
meant that if you were one of those who tried to do so, you did not get to see it. 
In an age when all we do is create and share our own self-portraits (“selfies”), it 
was kind of ironic that we could not see this portrait. And if you did not log into 
the WiFi, you would miss this information altogether.
Thus, without an organizational force, the work felt futile: we would never man-
age to see the portrait of Yousef. My desire to organize the action (to ask every-
one to lie on the floor) was overwhelmed by the potential embarrassment of fail-
ure and the worry that it might not even be what the artist (or the Tate) wanted. 
So no one took the initiative nor the responsibility to make it happen. I was de-
flated. Despite the forced physical reaction of the crying room, which was sup-
posed to evoke an emotional response and thus trigger an action, nothing much 
happened during the work. Everything happened for me long after. And my frus-
tration with the work grew over time, partly because I regretted my inaction, and 
partly because I realized that the piece was affective, but not in the moment. So 
I return to it.
8 
Wood, Tania Bruguera.
9 
“Our Neighbours: With Tania Bruguera,” Tate Modern, October 2018, https://www.tate.
org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/our-neighbours.

271
the oscillation of contemporary bodies between biopolitics and necropolitics
Bruguera’s attempt to get us to see ourselves as neighbors to our local commu-
nities and to other countries (citizens as neighbors) was meant to change views 
about migration and our role in it. As with any societal issue, not much changes 
unless enough people believe in change, want to affect it, and organize to make 
it happen; so we continue to experience this disappointment, much like in this 
piece. Perhaps then this piece was very much a success because it revealed to 
the audience the work that change requires of us and how often, for many rea-
sons, we do not do the work necessary to effect change.
I suggest that the specific issue Bruguera’s work is concerned with, migration 
through the concept of neighbor, addresses us as a collective subject and cri-
tiques contemporary necropolitics. Achille Mbembe
10
 defines necropolitics as 
“the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die,” which 
he believes is, in large measure, where “the ultimate expression of sovereignty 
resides.”
11
 Building on and departing from Michel Foucault’s biopower, as the 
areas of life over which powers has taken control, and biopolitics, as the man-
agement of governing of life by the sovereign,
12
 Mbembe considers the notion of 
biopower as insufficient to account for the ways in which in contemporary times 
“the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight against terror, 
makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective.”
13
 Making, as 
Marina Gržinić suggests, a “conceptual shift from occidental thought,”
14
 Mbem-
be sees war as a way to both exercise the right to kill and to achieve sovereign-
ty.
15
 “Imagining politics as a form of war,” Mbembe urges us to ask: “What place 
is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain 
body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?”
16
 Mbembe argues that, in 
the contemporary world, necropolitics—“contemporary forms of subjugation of 
10 
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham: Duke University Press, 
2019); Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 
(Winter 2003): 11–40, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11.
11 
Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 11.
12 
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76, 
ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).
13 
Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 12.
14 
Marina Gržinić, “Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe: Extended Essay on the Book,” Filozofski 
vestnik 42, no. 1 (2021): 221, https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.1.10.
15 
Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 39–40.
16 
Mbembe, 12.

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katerina paramana
life to the power of death”
17
—and necro-power are responsible for the ways in 
which
weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the 
creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast 
populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of 
living dead. [. . .] Under conditions of necropower, the lines between resistance 
and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred.
18
Bruguera’s 10,148,451 can be read as a direct critique of necropolitical power: 
how have migrants, and especially black and global majority migrants, been 
treated, and how could this change if they were understood as neighbors?
Gržinić, reflecting on Mbembe’s work on necropolitics, astutely points out the 
relationship between refugees and modes of killing since World War II. She ar-
gues that WWII demanded a moral narrative to justify killing and ways of doing 
it which could be seen by the West and the “regime of whiteness” as acceptable 
and justifiable.
19
 Thus, the ongoing refugee crisis, a consequence of the wars for 
power and profit, was dealt with not by appearing to intentionally kill refugees, 
but by imprisoning them in inhumane conditions.
20
 There are many examples 
of this with perhaps one of the worst being the recent prison-like conditions of 
refugees in Samos, Greece.
21
 Gržinić emphasizes the importance of Mbembe’s 
re-writing of genealogies through his articulation of the relation between de-
mocracy, racism, colonization, and migration: that democracy is a racialized 
system and colonization a way to regulate migratory movements and that cap-
17 
Mbembe, 39.
18 
Mbembe, 40.
19 
Gržinić, “Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe,” 224.
20 
Gržinić, 224. Jothie Rajah argues that normalizing the necropolitics of both past and 
present imperialism “fosters the discounting of life legitimized by necropolitical law.” 
Jothie Rajah, Discounting Life: Necropolitical Law, Culture, and the Long War on Terror 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 142–78.
21 
See “One Year since Greece Opened New ‘Prison-Like’ Refugee Camps, 22 NGOs Call for a 
More Humane Approach,” Statements and Reports, Amnesty International, September 19, 
2022, https://www.amnesty.eu/news/one-year-since-greece-opened-new-prison-like-ref -
ugee-camps-ngos-call-for-a-more-humane-approach/.

273
the oscillation of contemporary bodies between biopolitics and necropolitics
italism, between 16
th
 and 19th
 
century, “practised repopulation through preda-
tion, wealth extraction, and the formation of subaltern groups.”
22
The relationship between capitalism, migration, and racism is also crucial, be-
cause capitalism not only engendered racism (for it was the enslaved that pro-
vided the original capital)
23
 but is also constitutive of “Western instincts and 
economic subjectivity,”
24
 West’s predatory postcolonial elites and the “genocid-
al impulses” of European colonialism.
25
 Capitalism is therefore also a driving 
force for its wars for profit which have led to waves of migration.
In the UK alone, net migration has increased to a record level of 504,000, asy-
lum applications are now the highest in the last three decades, forty-one per 
cent of these are from people who have arrived in the UK in small boats, and 
almost 100,000 asylum seekers have been waiting for more than six months for 
their initial claims to be processed.
26
 Humanitarian visas accounted for a large 
proportion of immigrants, of which 89,000 arrived from Ukraine as a result of 
the war and 21,000 are Afghans or UK returnees from Afghanistan.
27
 The head of 
the Refugee Council, Enver Solomon, stated that this “global refugee crisis with 
millions of people fleeing their homes because of war, conflict and persecution 
[. . .] underline why urgent action is so important.”
28
But what does the life of an immigrant look like, even before they are forced to 
become migrants, when they are Black and global majority persons? Mbembe 
argues that even democratic societies are spaces in which racialized bodies are 
systematically exploited and experience constant loss.
29
 Lauren Berlant propos-
es the notion of “slow death” to describe the experience of everyday life of the 
22 
Gržinić, “Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe,” 226.
23 
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: 
University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
24 
Gržinić, “Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe,” 232.
25 
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove, 1967).
26 
Rajeev Syal and Jessica Elgot, “Migration to UK Rises to Record 504,000 with Ukraine and 
Hong Kong Schemes,” The Guardian, November 24, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/
uk-news/2022/nov/24/uk-net-migration-figures-record-ons.
27 
Syal and Elgot, “Migration to UK Rises.”
28 
Syal and Elgot, “Migration to UK Rises.”
29 
See Mbembe, Necropolitics.

274
katerina paramana
vulnerable, especially of people of color and the economically disadvantaged.
30
 
With “slow death,” she refers to “the physical wearing out of a population in a 
way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and 
historical existence.”
31
 Most importantly, Berlant urges us to “think about agen-
cy and personhood [. . .] also as an activity exercised within spaces of ordinari-
ness.”
32
 This is because
slow death prospers not in traumatic events, as discrete time-framed phe nomena 
like military encounters and genocides can appear to do, but in temporally labile 
environments whose qualities and whose contours in time and space are often 
identified with the presentness of ordinariness itself, that domain of living on 
in which everyday activity; memory, needs, and de sires; and diverse temporal-
ities and horizons of the taken-for-granted are brought into proximity and lived 
through.
33
In addition to her distinction between event and environment, Berlant makes 
a distinction between environment and crisis.
34
 Although we might be talking 
about refugee crises, black and brown bodies are in crisis daily. Berlant suggests 
that we cannot be referring to “crisis” as
that which is a fact of life and has been a defining fact of life for a given popula-
tion that lives that crisis in ordinary time. Of course this deployment of crisis is of-
ten explicitly and in tentionally a redefinitional tactic, an inflationary, distorting, 
or misdirecting gesture that aspires to make an environmental phenomenon ap-
pear sud denly as an event, because as a structural or predictable condition it has 
not engendered the kinds of historic action we associate with the heroic agency a 
crisis implicitly calls for [. . .]. Yet since catastrophe means change, crisis rhetoric 
belies the constitutive point that slow death—or the structurally induced attrition 
of persons keyed to their membership in certain populations—is neither a state 
of exception nor the opposite, mere banality, but a domain where an upsetting 
30 
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
31 
Berlant, 95.
32 
Berlant, 99.
33 
Berlant, 100.
34 
Berlant, 101.

275
the oscillation of contemporary bodies between biopolitics and necropolitics
scene of living is revealed to be interwoven with ordinary life after all, like ants 
discovered scurrying under a thoughtlessly lifted rock.
35
Long-term realities such as colonialism and capitalism’s destruction of bodies
36
 
therefore cannot be successfully dealt with when addressed as crises.
37
 Bru-
guera’s 10,148,451 deals with the slow death of migrant bodies, and particularly 
Black and Brown bodies who experience an everyday loss even after “settling” 
in a new country. 10,148,451 critiques contemporary necropolitics and draws our 
attention to this slow death addressing us as a collective subject who needs to 
take collective responsibility.
Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (2009, 2014, 2015): The Panoptic Gaze and 
Contemporary Biopolitics
Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #6 suggests a different kind of slow death in a very 
different political economy, that of Cuba. It addresses individuals as political 
subjects, commenting on the Cuban government’s panoptic gaze (2009 and 2014 
versions in Havana) and on contemporary biopolitics (2015 version in the UK). 
The Guggenheim describes the original 2009 version of the work as follows:
In a performance at the 2009 Havana Biennial, Tania Bruguera provided a tem-
porary platform for the free speech normally denied in Cuba. Members of the ex-
hibition’s audience were invited to take the stage and speak uncensored for one 
minute, after which time they were escorted away by two actors in military uni-
forms. A white dove was placed on each speaker’s shoulder in allusion to the one 
that landed on Fidel Castro during his first speech in Havana after the triumph 
of the 1959 revolution. Part of a series of works that seek to activate viewers’ par-
ticipation by recontextualizing powerful images from significant events, Tatlin’s 
Whisper #6 (Havana Version) confronts the widespread apathy that has followed 
in the wake of several failed social revolutions.
38
35 
Berlant, 101–2.
36 
Berlant, 108.
37 
Berlant, 105.
38 
See “Tania Bruguera: Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version),” Collection Online, Guggen-
heim, accessed September 2, 2023, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/33083.

276
katerina paramana
An orange-red curtain forms the backdrop for this 40-minute performance at 
the Wilfredo Lam Cultural Centre in Havana, Cuba.
39
 The audience is gathered 
around the stage, at the center of which is a podium with a microphone and two 
large speakers on each side of the stage. Behind the podium are two young peo-
ple in military uniforms. Two hundred disposable cameras have been distrib-
uted to the audience to document and share the event. One by one, audience 
members enter the stage and take the floor; they speak up. Once they step onto 
the podium, one of the uniformed guards places a white dove on their shoulder, 
recreating the familiar image of the photograph of Fidel Castro on the podium 
upon his arrival in Havana in 1959. For Bruguera, this work functions both “as 
a monument to a past moment and in the dimension of a future,”
40
 while for 
Tamara Díaz Bringas the work “read[s] the past to think about the present and 
imagine other futures,” by “imagining a public sphere in which everyone has a 
voice”
41
 despite the limitations presented by its context.
The performance breaks open a space that is normally censored. The work be-
gins with a spectator using their minute to cry. Affective speeches about change, 
freedom, self-respect and democracy follow. “Cuba is an island surrounded by 
sea and walled in by censorship” states one of the speakers, who advocates for 
the use of alternative blogs to open channels of communication and freedom, to 
awaken public opinion, and make the internet a public debating ground so the 
island can become more democratic and plural. Another speaker urges for the 
decriminalization of “the exercise of dissenting opinions” so that economic, po-
litical, and cultural projects can see the light. Another suggests they keep the mic 
open for 24 hours, asking those with opposing views to engage in live dialogue 
instead of listening to them through mechanisms of surveillance.
42
 One speaker 
asks all present to vote on whether the government should still be in power:
I would like to have all those here vote to see if we agree on certain aspects . . . 
Who actually agrees that the Castro family, which is the one that has been moni-
toring us these fifty years, should leave power? That they hand it over, that elec-
39 
Tania Bruguera, “El Susurro de Tatlin #6 (versión para La Habana),” Vimeo video, upload-
ed by Estudio Bruguera, March 23, 2011, 40:33, https://vimeo.com/21394727 .
40 
Bruguera in Tamara Díaz Bringas, “Matter of Time. Nine Letters to Tania Bruguera,” in 
Wood, Tania Bruguera, 59.
41 
Bringas, 59.
42 
Bruguera, “El Susurro de Tatlin #6.”

277
the oscillation of contemporary bodies between biopolitics and necropolitics
tions of a different type are held in Cuba, that there is a talk about the political 
prisoners, the Atunez case for example. He is on hunger strike . . . I think that rais-
ing our hand here today we may change things right now.
43
Some do. A man later arrives at the microphone with a black hood over his head, 
points to it, and says: “I think this [kidnapping] should be banned.” The work 
ends with Bruguera taking the podium: “Thank you very much, Cubans.”
44
This performance took place in the art context of the Havana Biennale, which 
is what made this public speaking up possible. Some have argued that, consid-
ering Cuba’s “oppressive government censorship [Tatlin’s Whisper #6] both em-
powered and endangered audiences and participants.”
45
 Jacqueline Laguardia 
Martinez’s opening to her 2022 article “The Political Economy of Contemporary 
Cuba” is indicative of the complicated larger context: “To evaluate contempo-
rary Cuba from any dimension, be it economic, political, or sociocultural, is a 
challenging exercise,” particularly due to its efforts in recent years to implement 
an ambitious plan of socioeconomic reforms.
46
 Reforms are how the Cuban gov-
ernment, referred to as La Revolución, has maintained power since Fidel Cas-
tro’s arrival on January 1, 1959—following the Cuban Revolution (July 26, 1953–
January 1, 1959) which ousted Fulgencio Batista—and until today with Miguel 
Díaz-Canel’s presidency (since 2019) and the 2019 constitution reform (the latter 
was assessed and refined by his predecessor, Raúl Castro, at an attempt to mod-
ernize the government).
47
Although until recently the prevailing view in Cuba was that writers and art-
ists (compared to the rest of the citizens) have the greatest autonomy and free-
dom, more so than ever before—a success attributed to their insistence for more 
“space” for expression and La Revolución’s capacity to reinvent itself—Yvon 
43 
Bruguera.
44 
Bruguera.
45 
Sanromán and Kantor, “Transitional Institutions,” 27.
46 
Jacqueline Laguardia Martinez, “The Political Economy of Contemporary Cuba,” in (Post-)
colonial Archipelagos: Comparing the Legacies of Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, Puerto 
Rico, and the Philippines, ed. Hans-Jürgen Burchardt and Johanna Leinius (Ann Arbor: 
University of Michigan Press, 2022), 76.
47 
Laguardia Martinez, 76–95; Yvon Grenier, “The Politics of Culture and the Gatekeeper State 
in Cuba,” Cuban Studies, no. 46 (2018): 261–86, https://doi.org/10.1353/cub.2018.0013.

278
katerina paramana
Grenier has a different interpretation.
48
 She suggests instead that the govern-
ment’s cultural policy oscillation between “closing” and “opening” and its alter-
nating tactics of enforcement between “openness and rigidity,” is not a new, but 
instead the regime’s governing strategy.
49
 It is the same strategy it used in mar-
ket reforms (which, for example, allowed the economy to increase trade with 
international markets and recognize foreign investment and private property
50
 
in 2019) that led to further concentration of power by the state, which controls 
who will benefit and how much.
51
 Grenier further suggests that, typically, writ-
ers and artists, inasmuch as they want freedom and autonomy, pursue partici-
pation “within the revolution” and recognition by the state.
52
 Their relationship 
with the state is one of “mutual accommodation” or “what Cuban sociologist 
Haroldo Dilla (2007) aptly called ‘subordinación negociada’ ” (negotiated sub-
ordination).
53
 With cultural policy, as with the markets, the state decides who 
(and how much and when) can publish, have visibility, travel abroad, and be 
pardoned.
54
 Crucially, the ability of the state to “open and close” any field “at the 
Comandante’s whim keeps the various groups guessing and competing in a cli-
mate of uncertainty.”
55
 The strategy of opening improves the government’s inter-
national image as well as the national one by showing that past errors of La Rev-
olución are corrected.
56
 These trends of openness and rigidity in both economic 
and cultural policy have mirrored one another since the 1990s.
57
 During 1994 
alone, about 30,000 Cubans left the country on makeshift boats—many drown-
ing—having been caught in the political struggle between Castro and the US.
58
 
Some criticism of the regime is possible through the “secondary parameters” 
(the “primary parameters” protect the political narrative of La Revolución and 
48 
Grenier, 261.
49 
Grenier, 261.
50 
Laguardia Martinez, “Contemporary Cuba,” 86–89.
51 
Javier Corrales, “The Gatekeeper State: Limited Economic Reforms and Regime Survival in 
Cuba, 1989–2002,” Latin American Research Review 39, no. 2 (June 2004): 35–65, https://
doi.org/10.1353/lar.2004.0025; quoted in Grenier, “Politics of Culture,” 262.
52 
Grenier, 261–62.
53 
Grenier, 262.
54 
Grenier, 262.
55 
Grenier, 265.
56 
Grenier, 265.
57 
Grenier, 268.
58 
Grenier, 271.

279
the oscillation of contemporary bodies between biopolitics and necropolitics
are not to be questioned).
59
 These set the limits of political participation and are 
the way artists can be critical of the government.
60
 Censorship in Cuba has been 
less overt recently—artworks rather than artists are being censored, and much 
can be accomplished by cultural institutions intentionally not recognizing the 
work of some artists or cancelling art exhibitions.
61
 More recently, however, art-
ists have not only been reprimanded, but also jailed.
62
 This is what happened 
with Bruguera’s second performance of Tatlin’s Whisper #6 in 2014.
The 2014 performance of Tatlin’s Whisper #6 ended before it began. The work 
was “aborted by the police, who arrested the artist and her many collaborators, 
both fellow artists and dissidents,” at 5 a.m. on the day of the performance.
63
 
The police interrogated them for several days and even confiscated the passport 
of Bruguera, who considers it “one of her most successful works, since the Cu-
ban government so neatly, and publicly completed” the work.
64
What preceded the performance, which was fittingly scheduled to take place 
on December 30, 2014 in the Plaza de la Revolución (“the plaza where a youth-
ful Fidel Castro once addressed millions”),
65
 and the arrest was the publication 
of an open letter by Bruguera. Following the announcement of the end of the 
U.S. embargo in 2014, Bruguera published “an open letter addressed to Barack 
Obama, Raúl Castro, and Pope Francis demanding a space for citizenship par-
ticipation.”
66
 The work addressed Cubans as political subjects and attempted to 
make this public square, “a space that was extremely ideologized but empty of 
politics,” back into “an agora, a democratic space.”
67
 Christian Viveros-Fauné 
writes in 2015:
59 
Grenier, 271–72.
60 
Grenier, 271–72.
61 
Grenier, 271–73.
62 
Grenier, 271–73.
63 
Sanromán and Kantor, “Transitional Institutions,” 21.
64 
Sanromán and Kantor, 7.
65 
Christian Viveros-Fauné, “How Tania Bruguera’s ‘Whisper’ Became the Performance 
Heard Round the World,” Artnet News, January 8, 2015, https://news.artnet.com/
art-world/how-tania-brugueras-whisper-became-the-performance-heard-round-the-
world-213637.
66 
Bringas, “Matter of Time,” 59.
67 
Bringas, 59.

280
katerina paramana
[Bruguera] was subsequently freed and rearrested twice more, after calling for a 
news conference in another plaza located along Havana’s famed Malecon seawall. 
An effort she promoted through Facebook, Twitter, and her own website using the 
hashtag #YoTambienExijo (I Also Demand), Bruguera’s frustrated performance 
grew in direct proportion to the moral cowardice of her arrest. Even in one of the 
least connected countries in the world—only 3.4 percent of Cuban households 
currently have Internet access—Bruguera’s message of creative protest, civic opti-
mism, and freedom of expression leapfrogged Cuba’s access and surveillance walls 
and went viral. [. . .] What Bruguera’s six-year-old performance did last week was 
to crystallize the contradictions besetting a profoundly unfair, coercive, authori-
tarian society—something only a few important works of art can achieve under the 
right circumstances. Inside Cuba, in 2015, Tatlin’s Whisper speaks loud and clear.
68
This challenging context speaks volumes about the impact that political econo-
my and art can have on one another. The regime in Cuba has had the effects of 
slow death, which Berlant calls “the physical wearing out of a population in a 
way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and 
historical existence,”
69
 and which prospers within the everyday ordinary envi-
ronment of living life
70
 in the Cuban panopticon, where conduct is regulated via 
surveillance.
71
 In fact, Cuba exhibits a complex combination of different modes 
of visuality. It functions both as a panoptic disciplinary society with what Mike 
Featherstone refers to as an “invisible surveillance gaze,” as well as, with its 
openings to market economics, “a governmental society based on invisibility, 
in which population and economic processes operate behind our backs and are 
best left alone.”
72
 Its complex colonial history, historical relationships with the 
US and USSR, and constant reforms that play with openness and rigidity make 
this a particularly complicated political economy: one that began as a socialist 
political economy, functions as a panoptic disciplinary society, has recognized 
foreign investment and private property with the 2019 Constitution, and now de -
68 
Viveros-Fauné, “Tania Bruguera’s ‘Whisper.’ ”
69 
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 95.
70 
Berlant, 100.
71 
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New 
York: Vintage Books, 1979).
72 
Mike Featherstone, “Preliminary Reflections on the Visible, the Invisible and Social 
Regulation: Panopticism, Biopolitics, Neoliberalism and Data Consumption,” Journal of 
Critical Studies in Business and Society 4, no. 1 (2013): 9.

281
the oscillation of contemporary bodies between biopolitics and necropolitics
pends on the service economy.
73
 It is this political economy that Tatlin’s Whisper 
#6 critiques and experiences the effects of its mechanisms of control.
After its 2014 performance, Tatlin’s Whisper #6 was presented at the Tate Modern 
in London, UK, in 2015. There, it had very different effects. A special presenta-
tion of the work was (re)staged “in an act of solidarity and support for Bruguera 
and artists all over the world persecuted for freedom of expression.”
74
 Artists, 
writers, curators, and members of the public spoke for one minute on a topic of 
their choice, as in the original work. The restaging critiqued both Cuba’s politi-
cal economy and the regime’s panoptic gaze. It also commented on a very differ-
ent political economy, that of the United Kingdom and neoliberal capitalism: a 
political economy in which there is freedom of expression, but the social safety 
net is continually eroded, the state works for the market, and the logic of the 
market rules and is applied to all areas of life through contemporary biopolitical 
control.
75
 This is the kind of economy that Cuba has been resisting for decades.
The 2015 restaging of Tatlin’s Whisper #6 perhaps loses its original “bite,” possi-
bly due in part to what Bruguera calls “political timing-specificity”: the moment 
of the 2014 work and its potential impact have passed, and the work functions as 
“a document of a specific political moment.”
76
 Nevertheless, what is important 
about the UK presentation is that the exposure of the political circumstances in 
Cuba helps to further the understanding of outsiders and the support they can 
offer Cubans.
In addition to the work of artists, alternative journalism has also contributed 
in recent years to understanding the complexities of the contemporary Cuban 
political economy, the everyday experiences of citizens, and their demands 
for freedom of expression and political change—for example, through the 27N 
collective and the San Isidro movement.
77
 María Isabel Alfonso notes that the 
73 
Laguardia Martinez, “Contemporary Cuba.”
74 
“Tania Bruguera: Tatlin’s Whisper #6,” Tate Modern, April 23, 2015, https://www.tate.org.
uk/art/artists/tania-bruguera-11982/tania-bruguera-tatlins-whisper-6.
75 
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, ed. 
Michel Sellenart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
76 
Bruguera in Sanromán and Kantor, “Transitional Institutions,” 23–24.
77 
Gerardo Mosquera, “Artivism and the Havana Biennial—An Interview with Gerardo 
Mosquera,” interview by Gigi Argyropoulou, New Alphabet School, December 8, 2021, 

282
katerina paramana
pandemic food and medicine shortages have highlighted not only the need for 
change in Cuba, but also the “increasing importance and agency that independ-
ent media have gained in recent years.”
78
 Although even the 2019 Constitution 
does not provide legal protection for these alternative media (the Constitution 
“expressly prohibits private ownership and printing of newspapers, books and 
other mass media”) their impact is crucial.
79
 Cuba connected to the internet in 
1996, granting controlled access to government and research institutes, univer-
sities, and workplaces. Reforms in 2008 allowed Cubans to connect to the in-
ternet discreetly, and it was not until 2013 that the country connected to the 
high-speed global internet.
80
 This allowed for the creation of unofficial blogs 
that criticized the government and pushed “the spurred collective recognition 
of the limitations of the official discourse and the imperative need to create an 
alternate set of media outlets.”
81
While 10,148,451 addressed the collective subject and critiqued contemporary 
necropolitics, Tatlin’s Whisper #6 addressed individuals as political subjects. 
The 2009 and 2014 Havana versions commented on the panoptic gaze, while the 
2015 UK version, anchored in both the Cuban and the UK political economies, 
was able to comment both on the panoptic gaze and contemporary biopolitics. 
In doing so, the difficulties of the Cuban political economy for its citizens and 
the slow death they experience were made visible, perhaps obscuring the com-
plexities of the UK’s neoliberal capitalist political economy and the different 
ways controls are applied there through biopower and necropower.
Closing: Bodies “Acting in Concert” Towards Change
Tania Bruguera’s work is both aesthetically and politically potent. Here, I looked 
at her 2019 Hyundai commission 10,148,451 presented at Tate Modern and the 
three versions of Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (the Havana versions in 2009 and 2014 and 
https://newalphabetschool.hkw.de/artivism-and-the-havana-biennial-an-interview-with- 
gerardo-mosquera/.
78 
María Isabel Alfonso, “In Cuba, Independent Media Struggle to Navigate Polarized 
Waters,” NACLA Report on the Americas 53, no. 4 (Winter 2021): 387 , https://doi.org/10.108
0/10714839.2021.2000766.
79 
Alfonso, 388.
80 
Alfonso, 388–89.
81 
Alfonso, 388–89.

283
the oscillation of contemporary bodies between biopolitics and necropolitics
the Tate Modern version in 2015). Through 10,148,451, I have argued that Bru-
guera addressed the spectators as a collective subject that bears the responsibil-
ity for change (change in general as well as in relation to migrants in particular) 
and critiqued contemporary necropolitics that put vulnerable populations at 
risk on a daily basis, making visible the slow death they experience. In contrast, 
the work Tatlin’s Whisper #6, as I have suggested, addressed individuals as po-
litical subjects and commented on the panoptic gaze of Cuban politics and on 
contemporary biopolitics in the neoliberal capitalist world. Through my analy-
sis of both works, I have shown how Bruguera’s work is created to comment on 
the specific political economies in which it is presented, how the perceptions of 
the work’s politics differ when presented in different political economies, and 
the insights the work therefore offers these economies. As the works discussed 
here demonstrate, Bruguera has often accomplished more with her performanc-
es than local and national governments (although one could argue that she lets 
these governments off the hook to some extent by doing the work for them). I 
propose that these works, which I referred to as her “symbolic work with activist 
parameters” (that is, work that functions at the level of the symbolic but is also 
linked to actions that have concrete effects for its participants), are surprising-
ly more efficacious than her activist work because they operate at the level of 
the symbolic. In doing so, they are able to reach larger numbers of people and 
at different affective registers, let alone survive in difficult political economies. 
Crucially, the works discussed here allow us to see the slow death of contempo-
rary bodies and how important and necessary it is for bodies to “act in concert”
82
 
towards change.
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