Silhouettes of protest, like gun smoke, like a heap of stinking motor oil leaking from a broken-down car that has been left burning on the long road called “time” since the post-Martial Law whirlwind of the 1980s and in the years that followed.

There are striking protagonists and eye-catching scenery along this long road. For instance, the (Wild Lily) Student Movement activists have a proclivity for resorting to “back in the day” when they recount the sense of purity, idealism, divergence, and change since the 1990s, as though they were chatting about a wild lily that had a specific lifespan whose withering was inevitable and finding solace in the self-aggrandizing “after all I was once youthful” while accepting its inevitable demise. But beyond the nurturing imagery of a botanical gardener, the cacophony among non-intellectuals was in reality a vociferous fervour, an unbridled frenzy, and a jagged peril that was pervaded through society. Beyond the outwardly solemn and ceremonious “localization,”“”(representative) democratization” and various bourgeois/ modern/urbane grand narratives are merely incidental miscellany, including the neglected and forgotten incidences such as the “Bumble Bees Brigade” who swarmed with spray paint and vandalized, or “Street Vigilantes” who advocate violence as the only means to combat violence, and the airwaves of unregulated “pirate radio stations,” etc.

In the textual writing of selective recall and retelling, this grotesque, uncanny, frenetic disarray is usually either marginalized and trivialized as a type of “necessary evil” in a temporarily painful stage of political transformation; or else is written by proxy in a romanticized tone with the rose-tinted gaze of nostalgia. The visage of the transient voiceless masses of the past remains obscured.

“Excerpted from the first paragraph of this article.” 

This article is published in Broken Spectre catalog.

Read more：
1.捕捉文化史的鬼影：「破身影」展覽（2017/07/01-09/17）
2.〈[ET@T Forum] 重新破裂，或如何從漫長的九〇年代離開？〉，在地實驗影音檔案庫，2017/07/09
3.「過於喧囂的孤獨－－台灣九〇年代的文化轉型」，在地實驗影音檔案庫
4.〈濁水溪公社1998年現場演唱及專訪紀錄〉，在地實驗影音檔案庫，1998/08/07
5.〈[文宣]「台北破爛生活節」手繪時間表傳單〉，在地實驗影音檔案庫，1994/09/01-1994/09/05