The Donbat Manifesto — I

28.08.26

We no longer want the docile artist, subject to the bourgeois imperatives of an elitist milieu serving a ruling class, begging for the attention of the powerful in the hope of a new gilded cage.
We no longer want an art that contents itself with dutifully occupying walls, screens, fairs, museums and complacent consciences. Or worse, merely looking pretty.
We no longer want an art that endlessly exhibits its own powerlessness.
We no longer want a critique that embellishes the world it claims to contest.

We refuse to be the sensitive architects of our own servitude.

Donbat is born there.
In this refusal.
But this refusal is not an end in itself, only a beginning.

We affirm that every transformation begins with attentiveness to things, with permanent vigilance.
Not police vigilance, not the surveillance of others, but attention to the concrete configurations of the between-us and of power: who are you, who decides, who names, who captures, who accumulates, who is made visible, who is silenced, and why. To see and understand what we see. At once. This vigilance is not contemplative; it is informative. It conditions intervention, as the fuse primes the charge. Boom. It wrests situations from the false self-evidence that protects them.

We affirm the equality of intelligences¹.
There are not, on one side, those who know and, on the other, those who must be awakened, instructed, led. There are no enlightened artists facing audiences left in the dark, nor experts facing laypeople condemned to being spoon-fed explanations. Donbat begins from the principle that everyone can think, connect, deduce, transmit, act. It does not seek to regiment consciousness but to activate capacities. It does not dispense light; it works so that each person can find it for themselves in the shadows and act upon the apparatuses that conceal it.

We affirm that society is held together not only by contract, self-interest and market exchange, but by deeper obligations: to give, to receive, to reciprocate². Donbat reactivates this anthropological foundation against the neoliberal fiction of the self-sufficient individual. Here, to give is not to impoverish oneself, but indeed to enrich oneself. Giving means creating chains of efficacy. It means circulating what the market would seek to make scarce. It means freeing value from its speculative captivity. It means (re)making relation a force, putting under tension what must circulate for something to change.

We affirm that a society reveals itself through the use it makes of its excess³. Donbat opposes shameful accumulation, profitability elevated into an absolute horizon, utility reduced to profit. It rehabilitates non-productive expenditure when it liberates, connects, opens up, incites revolt. We prefer expenditure that transforms to investment that locks things down. We prefer the profusion of possibilities to the bookkeeping management of lives.

We affirm that ideas move bodies only on condition that they affect them⁴. It is therefore not enough to be right. We must also produce attachments, desires, combative joys. Politics without affects leaves the ground of power untouched. Donbat rejects the emotional austerity of pure doctrines as much as the affective manipulation of propaganda regimes. It works on affects to give greater density to the power to act. It seeks not fleeting excitement, but collective endurance.

We affirm that art has no reason to exist if it exhausts itself commenting on what makes it possible. It is not made to duplicate the world, but to shift its sensory coordinates. The work no longer derives its value from what it exhibits, but from what it triggers. Bringing into relation. Setting in motion. Art ends neither in what it shows, nor in the object that fixes it, nor in the place that consecrates it. Donbat does not seek to “represent” an imbalance, but to create, through its requalification, the conditions for its resolution. The work, then, does its work through what it makes possible — beyond the opening, beyond itself — not through the perpetual display of its organised incapacity. It exists in the tenuous fabric of the between-us, the persistent, transmissible, reproducible dynamic of a common becoming anew.

We know that aesthetics is, by its very nature, political. We therefore reject the idea of any apoliticism in art, detached from all programmatic intent. To ignore this is to reduce art to its form and deny what it organises, while the political is abandoned to politics alone, itself reduced to management programmes that administer powerlessness. From this separation arise an art with no purchase and politics with no common horizon. Donbat rejects it; it connects without conflating.

Lasting transformation demands adaptability. The situation dictates, always. We know that confrontation is inevitable; yet we refuse to fetishise it.
We must find purchase.
Where to act.
With whom.
By what means.
So that something gives way without action reproducing what it claims to undo.
A minimal gesture can open a breach if its configuration is right.

We call on artists to stop begging the market for permission to exist.
We call on citizens to stop outsourcing their power to act.
We call on workers in knowledge, care, education and culture to recognise that, often without knowing it, they already carry practices of Donbat within them.

For Donbat is not reserved for a sensitive elite.
It is not a specialism.
It is not a stylistic school.
It is not an ethical supplement for artists in need of justification.

It is a way of inhabiting the world.
A way of circulating what the dominant order wants to concentrate.
A way of transforming.
A way of transmitting without dominating.
A way of hoping without lying to ourselves.

To make a collective cease to be an audience.

We do not believe that good intentions alone will bring violence to an end any time soon. Nor do we believe in the eternity of the structures that crush us. Between complaint and the spectacle of indignation, we choose the sensible organisation of powers. Between lazy resignation and hollow heroism, we choose calibrated action, even on a small scale, especially on a small scale, because that is where it sets a dynamic in motion. A battering-ram blow. A crack. We do not believe in storms without lightning.

Donbat does not wait for the great day of revolution to begin.
It begins where vigilance encounters a means of acting.
Where knowledge is transmitted rather than kept under lock and key.
Where a sign becomes a call;
an encounter, a power.

We therefore declare the practice of Donbat open.
Let it leave the texts.
Let it equip itself with tools, relays, complicities, forms, archives, ruses, schools, evidence. What else do we know?
Let it learn to strike without reproducing brutality.
Let it learn to give without dissolving itself.
Let it learn to endure without exhausting itself.

For the possible is not something waiting for us.
The possible is made.