Silent Control in the Scream of Venice

On May 8, an unannounced work takes place at the Giardini della Biennale, consciously avoiding the classical form of performance. “RMFC – Ready Made for Control” does not present itself as a performance, but as a minimal deviation within a system already functioning on its own. There is no stage, no audience, no climax. Only two people moving through the Biennale like everyone else. They walk. They observe. They stop. They talk. They continue. 

A young woman and a young man move through the pavilions of the Venice Biennale without producing spectacle. They do not act. They do not protest. They explain nothing.
 Only one detail remains visible: electronic ankle monitors on their legs.
 No one reacts. Perhaps that is the reaction. 

The devices are neither hidden nor exhibited. They are there with the same naturalness as the phone in one’s hand, the security camera above the entrance, or the QR-coded ticket in one’s pocket. Control no longer appears as violence, but as the design of everyday life. At this point, RMFC ceases to be a performance and becomes a structural mirror. Not because it creates an artificial reality, but because it adds nothing to the existing one. The work does not construct control — it merely makes visible the fact that control has already become normality. 

The Giardini is the ideal site for this intervention. An architecture of representation where nations organize their identities as exhibitions. Every pavilion is an apparatus of visibility: someone speaks, someone is represented, someone remains outside. The Biennale is not only an exhibition of art — it is a political choreography of what is allowed to be seen. 

But this year, the choreography itself fractures.
 
Several pavilions remain closed in response to the situation in Palestine and Ukrain. Silence enters the Biennale physically. Closed doors become louder than many exhibited works. Absence itself begins to function simultaneously as artistic and political material. Visitors move between active spaces and institutional voids. Within this tension, RMFC changes function. The electronic ankle monitors no longer appear as an extreme metaphor, but as the logical continuation of a world that administers movement, visibility, and silence through mechanisms of control. 

The title refers to the ready-made tradition of Marcel Duchamp, but with a decisive shift: it is no longer the object that is declared art, but the system itself. The system as ready-made. Control as ready-made. The Biennale as ready-made. 

The work does not directly accuse anyone. Because it no longer needs to.
 Today, control no longer functions through prohibition, but through integration. It does not merely impose limits — it produces normality. And perhaps the most efficient form of control is the one no longer perceived as control. RMFC does not ask what art is. It asks who can move without being controlled. Who can remain visible. And who disappears silently within the system. 

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” 

— Benjamin Franklin (1755) 

RMFC and the Displacement of the Ready-Made within the Institutional Exhibition Space

With the introduction of the readymade in 1917, Marcel Duchamp fundamentally challenged a prevailing assumption of art: that an artwork is defined by craftsmanship, aesthetic quality, or expressive intention. By transferring an industrially manufactured urinal into the gallery space, Duchamp shifted the meaning of the object entirely into the realm of institutional context. The object itself remained unchanged; its function was suspended, and its meaning radically transformed. The exhibition space operated as a semantic apparatus that conferred a new status upon an everyday object.

RMFC – Ready Made For Control formally engages with this historical gesture while fundamentally displacing its logic. Whereas Duchamp’s readymade neutralized the original function of the object, RMFC insists upon it. The electronic ankle bracelet monitor is not introduced into the exhibition space as a symbol, prop, or metaphor, but as an operative control device whose societal function remains intact. Meaning does not shift through aesthetic revaluation, but through institutional confrontation.

Within the context of the Berlin Biennale, this displacement does not occur through visibility in a conventional sense. The ankle monitor is neither exhibited nor displayed, nor explained. It is worn. The bodies of its wearers move seemingly freely through the exhibition space while simultaneously remaining embedded within an external surveillance system. The exhibition space thus becomes not a stage for representation, but an interface between two systems: the art system and the system of control.

In contrast to Duchamp’s urinal—removed from everyday use and placed within the museum—RMFC introduces everyday reality itself, in its controlling and regulatory form, into the institution of art. The biennial does not function as a neutral frame, but as an active producer of meaning. It does not aestheticize the control object; instead, it exposes its own structural proximity to mechanisms of normalization, selection, and regulation.

The significance of RMFC within the exhibition space therefore does not arise from the object alone, but from its relationship to the institutional context. The biennial traditionally presents itself as a site of openness, critical reflection, and intellectual freedom. RMFC disrupts this self-description by inscribing real restrictions of freedom into this space without explicitly foregrounding them. Control remains invisible, operational, and functional—precisely as it operates in everyday social life.

This also alters the role of the audience. Viewers encounter no performance and no artwork in the conventional sense. Instead, they encounter individuals whose freedom of movement is technically regulated, without this regulation being immediately perceptible. The boundary between free participation and structural restriction becomes blurred. The exhibition space turns into a site where freedom is no longer assumed, but implicitly questioned.

RMFC thus reveals that the exhibition space is not an autonomous realm detached from societal power relations. Rather, it appears as part of a broader dispositif in which bodies, movements, and access are already pre-structured. In this context, the ankle monitor functions less as an isolated object than as an analytical instrument: it exposes the fact that control does not begin where it becomes visible, but where it has already been normalized.

Compared to Duchamp’s readymade, the focus shifts from the question “What is art?” to the question “Under what conditions does art take place?” RMFC does not challenge the artwork as such, but the institutional conditions of its perception. It problematizes not the status of the object, but the status of the subject within the exhibition space.

In this sense, RMFC is neither an ironic commentary nor a symbolic gesture, but a sober analytical intervention. The electronic ankle bracelet monitor is not aestheticized within the exhibition space; it is contextualized. Its presence alters not only its own meaning, but also the meaning of the exhibition space itself. The biennial no longer appears solely as a site of critical freedom, but also as a space in which societal logics of control become visible—and at the same time remain invisibly operative.

RMFC thus marks a contemporary development of the readymade: not as the liberation of the object from its function, but as the exposure of a function that has long since become part of our present—even in spaces where it was traditionally presumed to be absent.

Wearing Control

On the Invisible Action at the Berlin Biennale

Tonight, as the 13th Berlin Biennale opens its doors to the international art world, an imperceptible yet conceptually charged performance unfolds within its halls. Two individuals—artists, though indistinguishable from the audience—enter the exhibition space not as officially invited contributors, but as visitors. They wear electronic ankle bracelet monitors, identical to those used by judicial authorities to enforce house arrest or track the movement of convicted individuals. Their behavior is quiet, inconspicuous. They look at art. They blend in. Nothing, ostensibly, is happening.

Yet everything is happening.

Action
This non-event, orchestrated under the title RMFC – READY MADE FOR CONTROL, is an action in the most distilled and Foucauldian sense of the word: a gesture that does not depict control, but rather performs it by adopting its logic and symbols. The action consists not in theatricality or visibility, but in a silent inscription of surveillance into the body of the visitor-performer. The electronic monitor becomes both artifact and agent, simultaneously a Duchampian readymade and a disciplinary prosthesis. It is this tension—the transposition of a real mechanism of control into the realm of aesthetic circulation—that activates the work.

Non-performance as a performance
This gesture functions as a non-performance precisely because it refuses the formal codes of performance art: there is no stage, no audience, no transformation, no spectacle. But in this refusal lies its radicality. It is a performance insofar as it is intentional, time-based, and embodied. The artists enact a role within a system (the exhibition), inserting themselves into its apparatus like a Trojan horse of institutional critique.

Institutional critique and performative minimalism 
The action is thus a living citation of both institutional critique and performative minimalism , but stripped of any visible declaration. It forces us to ask: What is an artist's freedom in a culture increasingly structured by invisible boundaries of compliance and control? Can the museum or biennale still function as a space of autonomy, or has it already become a site of soft disciplinary power?

That the performers are indistinguishable from other visitors is essential. It is not who they are that matters, but what they carry—and what we fail to notice. In this way, the action is both a mirror and a provocation. The ankle bracelet monitor, a banal object of law enforcement, is transformed into an artistic gesture not through aesthetic manipulation, but by recontextualization. The gallery-goer becomes a suspect, the art lover a tracked body, the exhibition a theatre of normative behavior.

This quiet incursion into the space of art does not disrupt the Biennale with noise, but with structural irony. It reclaims the terrain of art as a place where the boundaries of freedom can still be questioned—not through representation, but through embodied participation in the logics of control.