Nov. 22th 2025- Dec .14th 2025
Path of Democracy in Progress: Echoes of Polyphonic Carnival
Starting from the human rights principle of “liberal equality,” this art festival establishes a connection between art and politics, enabling the formerly oppressed to become masters of their own destinies—active participants and autonomous creators—while also highlighting the politics of art in which the spectator is reduced to passive, oppressed labor. Here, the monitored are transformed into protagonists on stage; within the shifting scenes of society and theater, the unfinished road of democracy is performed at the Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park, where passive spectators are recast as “heroes of the multitude.”
Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s aesthetics of “polyphony” and the “carnivalesque,” the project engages voices and bodies in theater to summon the collectively silenced. By reactivating memory, perception, speech, silence, and unfinished actions, the work resonates within the unresolved tensions of a democratic context, allowing history and memory to be re-echoed and reinterpreted in the present. This reveals the potential and affective labor of the “ninety-nine percent” resisting the authoritarian rule of the “one percent.” The former Jing-Mei Military Detention Center, once a site of oppressive rule under the White Terror, is here transformed into a monumental space symbolizing human right. It corresponds to Michel Foucault’s metaphor of the “panopticon,” exposing how mechanisms of viewing produce obedient, silent subjects. The project introduces the idea of a “reversed panopticon,” in which the perspective of the imprisoned confronts the gaze of surveillance and oppression.
The Unfinished Road is both performance and political action in art, emphasizing active participation in democracy. It focuses on: (1) an “engaged politics” that explores new ways of life and social relations; (2) “community participation” that breaks down the boundary between performers and audience; (3) a “democratic atmosphere” that unsettles the hierarchies of society and theater; and (4) “polyphony” as a mode of imagining possible futures. This reconfigures the time, space, and relations of the social theater of everyday life, promoting intellectual autonomy, sustaining individual difference, and enabling human potentiality to unfold fully. Through performance, speech, writing, and dance, the oppressed reveal their inexhaustible capacities, narrating their own stories and, on this unfinished road, becoming masters of their own destinies.
see more : About the 2025 Human Rights Festival
