Introduction
“For any Manifesto to succeed, it must speak to our hearts like a poem while infecting the mind with images and ideas that are dazzlingly new. It needs to open our eyes […]. It should make us feel hopelessly inadequate for not having recognized these truths ourselves […]. Lastly it needs to have the power of a Beethoven symphony, urging us to become agents […]” (Varoufakis 5). In Global Manifestos for the Twenty-first Century (2024), Yanis Varoufakis emphasizes the contagiously stirring, infectiously affective dimension of “successful” or effective manifestos. Emphasizing emotion, affect and sensory experience, Varoufakis likens the manifesto to an aesthetic experience that encompasses a corporeal, bodily dimension.
Manifestos have a long tradition going back at least as far as Karl Marx’ and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto of 1848, which, as Martin Puchner has argued, was a defining moment for the formation of the genre (1). This was followed by various waves of manifesto writing that included art manifestos, political manifestos, Black Power manifestos, feminist, ecological, anarchist, fascist, and terrorist manifestos, as well as Brand manifestos. Following a long decline into near obscurity, the manifesto has resurfaced in the 21st century with an increasing presence and popularity. In their article “Reflections on Manifesto Writing” (2022), Julian Hanna and Simone Ashby point out that there is
an evolution and an ebb and flow in the popularity of the form: after the successive upheavals of the financial crisis in 2008, Occupy and the Arab Spring in 2011–2012, the US presidential election in 2016, and the worldwide protests following the death of George Floyd in 2020, the manifesto has regained the prominent position it held during previous waves in the early 20th century and the late 1960s. This has also been aided by the rise of the internet, and social media in particular. (23)
There is a clear “surge and popularity of the manifesto genre in current academic debates and counter-cultural practices” (Chrysagis and Kompatsiaris 121), with manifestos “as a form with a capacity to engage, stir and provoke” (119) serving “as a form of counterculture and dissent” (122).
Evangelos Chrysagis and Panos Kompatsiaris begin their article “Introduction: Manifestos of the Contemporary” (2022) with the following question: “What is the purpose of writing a manifesto — a relic of modernism — today?” (119). They note that mass literacy and printing expanded manifesto authorship in modernity, and the internet now enables virtually anyone to publish manifestos (119). Instead of being printed and dispersed as printed pamphlets, many 21st-century manifestos are published and disseminated online, allowing for a particular kind of anonymity, inclusivity and interconnectedness. The particularities of online publication are also highly adaptable (online manifestos can easily be changed after publication), and this makes for special aesthetic considerations. Various contemporary movements, from Occupy Wallstreet, Black Lives Matter, to #MeToo, and environmental groups like #FridaysForFuture, are using manifestos to disseminate their grievances, demands, and visions for the future. In his article “‘Future Shock’: Manifestos in the Digital Age” (2019), Julian Hanna describes the “rebirth of the manifesto as a networked digital genre” and argues that “[t]here are many reasons for its resurgence, including the return of radical politics in the West since the 2008 financial crisis and the 2016 United States presidential election, and the rapid rise of social media.” One of the most “vital and adaptable online genres,” the manifesto has become increasingly present and relevant: as Ashby et al. argue, “no grassroots political movement, startup, online zine or hacker collective is complete without a declaration of principles” (557-558).
This essay will explore two examples of 21st century manifesto aesthetics: Martine Syms’s satirical “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” (2013, 2014, 2015) and Julian Rosefeldt’s bombastic Manifesto, a multi-channel installation (2015) later adapted for film (2017).1 I argue that the manifesto genre in the 21st century is an affective and convention-laden genre whose defining aesthetic qualities are its self-conscious interconnectedness, self-referentiality, and meta-reflection, which allow it to critically interrogate and/or parody its own form. These traits are essential in an era when cultural authority and authenticity are destabilized, enabling the manifesto to resonate emotionally while adapting to a fragmented, self-aware cultural landscape. Contemporary manifestos increasingly reflect this instability by turning their attention to their own form—commenting on their status as manifestos, acknowledging their rhetorical excesses, and even questioning the efficacy of the genre itself. Many are written as direct or indirect responses to earlier manifestos, engaging in an intertextual dialogue that highlights both their lineage and their limitations.
Self-referentiality is key in genres like postmodern literature, metafiction, satire, and mockumentary film because it highlights the constructed nature of narratives and challenges assumptions about truth and authority. In manifestos, self-referentiality emphasizes their role as rhetorical performances: acts of identity-building and world-making rather than mere lists of beliefs. Parodic or meta-manifestos amplify this by exaggerating the genre’s conventions—its urgency, bombast, and declarative tone—not only to mock them but to expose their constraints and question their continued usefulness and authority. These formal strategies matter because they open spaces for alternative modes of activism and community—ones grounded not in fixed ideologies but in critical engagement, shared irony, and reflexive identification. Both Syms’s and Rosefeldt’s manifestos use parody and performance to model a different kind of collective subjectivity.
The “Manifesto” and its Origin(s)
In her book Manifesto: A Century of Isms (2000), Mary Ann Caws argues that “[g]enerally the manifesto stands alone, does not need to lean on anything else, demands no other text than itself. Its rules are self-contained, included in its own body” (xxv). This assertion, however, overlooks the deeply intertextual nature of manifestos. Ruth Houghton and Aoife O’Donoghue emphasize the relational nature of manifestos and define them as “overtly political acts of legal/political performance; they are in dialogue with each other, with counter and anti-manifestos, and with the legal-political infrastructures they inhabit” (412). Rather than existing in isolation, writers of manifestos draw from, respond to, and eagerly engage with previous texts, traditions, discourses, — and specifically with previous manifestos.
The origin of the first recorded usage of the word “manifesto”2 as a title may be surprising. Instead of “a collective, revolutionary, and subversive voice, ‘manifesto’ [originally] […] designates a declaration of the will of a sovereign. It is a communication, authored by those in authority, by the state, the military, or the church, to let their subjects know their sovereign intentions and laws” (Puchner 12). In Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (2005), Puchner convincingly argues that while “[s]cattered texts had been called manifestos for centuries, […] Marx’ and Engels’ss Manifesto gathered these texts into a distinct genre” (1), thus “invent[ing] a poetry of the future revolution” (1).
In a way, the Communist Manifesto became the reference text for all subsequent manifestos worldwide. While avant-garde Modernist art manifestos like Filippo T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” (1909) and Wyndam Lewis’s “Vorticist Manifesto” (1914) are clearly not communist texts but aesthetic manifestos that attack the sentimentality of 19th century art and emphasize the value of violence, energy, speed, the machine, and war, they still inscribe themselves into a tradition of manifesto-writing. Since the publication of the Communist Manifesto, the genre has continuously evolved and expanded. While not all texts that can be classified as manifestos choose the label of “manifesto” in their title (cf. Yanoshewsky 261), it is significant when they do. In those instances, the authors are self-consciously including their text within the aesthetics of this genre, a text mode that is culturally, ideologically, semantically, semiotically, and rhetorically coded.
The Aesthetics of Contemporary Manifestos
“In principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles” (Tristan Tzara, from his “Dada Manifesto” of 1918)
What are the aesthetics of the manifesto? More precisely, what are the aesthetics of the manifesto genre in the 21st century? These questions might be addressed in terms of the purpose of the manifesto and its tone.
Manifestos are inherently radical and provocative, presenting strong, uncompromising positions aimed at manipulating public views to “convince and convert” (Caws xix). Enabled by mass literacy, printing, and now the internet, they reach broad audiences through a “form with a capacity to engage, stir and provoke” (Chrysagis and Kompatsiaris 119). Manifestos mark moments of urgency with deictic expressions (Caws xx), use epigrammatic, declarative rhetoric, and are visually or rhetorically “loud” (Lyon 15; Caws xx). Julian Hanna and Simone Ashby (2022) succinctly describe the aesthetics of manifestos:
Manifestos are usually short and visually striking […]. After an eye-catching title, a preamble often sets the tone, followed by the familiar list of tenets, vows or demands, and finished with a rousing call to action. The tone is bold and confident, the language transparent and easily understood at a glance. […] Common rhetorical features include: a heightened or excited tone (and a higher than average use of exclamation points), which may tend toward the utopian, militant or apocalyptic; a playful or ironic stance that hides a serious underlying message; exhortations or appeals (‘join us!’); aggressive verbs (‘challenge’, ‘attack’); repetition or refrain; use of slogans; binaries or dichotomies; syntactic shifts as the manifesto gathers pace; and sweeping declarations. (26-27)
A manifesto’s rhetorical form and style typically includes a direct address, the use of imperatives, lists and repetitions, as well as exaggerations and absolutisms. The direct address (through the use of the collective “We” and/or the addressee “you”) creates a confrontational or invitational tone, the use of imperatives and urgent commanding language (“unite, demand, resist, destroy, build, …”) incites action; repetitions and lists create rhythm and emphasis, and exaggerations signal rupture with the status quo. Visual elements like typography, layout, and design play a crucial role in a manifesto’s impact and aesthetic. Increasingly multimodal, manifestos can pair text with images, videos, memes, and interactive formats. Traditionally using the language of advertising, manifestos often combine image and text. As Julian Hanna states: “Manifestos are the original memes, in a sense: provocative and attention-seeking, they fuse simple, direct statements with bold images” (qtd. in Cuell). Manifestos perform an aesthetic of temporal rupture, immediacy, and drama, projecting radical futures with confident authority, often before such authority is fully realized (Hanna and Ashby 24). By “breaking” from the past and projecting or demanding a radical new future, manifestos create an aesthetics of rupture, immediacy, drama, and expectation. This performativity varies widely, from militant avant-garde nihilism to more conciliatory expressions aligned with brands and creative industries (Chrysagis and Kompatsiaris 120). According to Davide Giurato, the link between linguistic action and armed attack can be found in the field of the aesthetic avant-gardes, where text and action are violently interwoven (50). This connection is also evident in well-known cases such as Valerie Solanas’ss SCUM Manifesto (1967) and her attack on Andy Warhol or the so-called “Unabomber Manifesto” (1995) by Ted Kaczynski and his bombing rampage.
Typically authored by anonymous collectives rather than individuals (Lyon 34), manifestos construct a deliberate dichotomy by posing an explicit or implicit “we” against a “they,” setting up a rhetorical battlefield (Caws xx). They embody “the mode of agonism, the voice of those who are contra” (Perloff, The Futurist 82). Manifestos written by marginalized groups “disrupt the construction of both the ‘we’ and ‘the people’ as constituent power-holders” (Houghton and O’Donoghue 413), positioning their audience as active participants (419), though the “we” can also be exclusionary (431). Politically, manifestos restructure the relationship between speaker and audience, often amplifying marginalized voices.
For the purpose of my argument, I understand the manifesto as a set of formal conventions that mobilizes a collective “we” in the name of breaking down established forms. But since the manifesto itself has become an established form, it can now be parodied—like any other “jargon of authenticity,”3 What was once a call to arms can now be repurposed, re-performed, or reimagined, often with irony. I argue that in contemporary contexts, especially digital ones, manifestos function like modular tools—formats anyone can plug into to signal urgency, protest, or identity. The “we” they invoke is always shifting, often more performative than political. Parodic manifestos do not reject this—we still laugh as a “we”—but they expose how the genre’s rebellious posture has become a kind of cultural shorthand. In that sense, the form becomes both the object of critique and the vehicle for it: nostalgic for the power of collective speech, even as it questions whether such collectivity is still viable.
Active processes of manifesto-making have become increasingly popular. Chrysagis and Kompatsiaris mention the “Black Feminism Remix Lab, a forum for Black feminist activists across Europe” that was meant to take place in Berlin in June 2020 with the “goal of co-producing a manifesto” (123), and scholars/activists like Julian Hanna have given numerous workshops on how to write manifestos. Hanna and Ashby also emphasize the participatory dimension of manifestos and invite the reader to consider writing their own manifesto. The question “So how do you write a manifesto?” is answered as follows: “By design it is an accessible form for both audience and practitioner — you can use a template; you can borrow from Marx or Marinetti or whomever you choose. Or you can write a manifesto in conversation with another text: […]” (26). This succinct assertion underscores the formulaic, potentially easily imitable aesthetic of the manifesto.
Hanna and Ashby also mention both a web application as well as a card game (“MANIFESTO!”) that they have invented to make it easy for people — even those not yet as familiar with the genre — to create their own manifestos. Hanna and Ashby are in fact the founders of the “Words in Freedom Project” that “created a card game for activists called MANIFESTO!” (30). First developed in 2019, it was “a way of introducing individual and collaborative manifesto writing to academic audiences. A hand of cards includes prompts from four categories: Provocation (the theme, e.g. ‘Better for Whom?’), Orientation (the type, e.g. ‘Declaration’), Opening (the initial phrase, e.g. ‘Come, Comrades’) and Tone (the register, e.g. ‘Hopeful’)” (Hanna and Ashby 25). One of the explanatory cards in the game, titled “GAMEPLAY” ends with the words: “Caution will get you nowhere! Disseminate and share photos of your #manifestogame and #artandaimanifestos on Instagram @futures_of_europe, and use them to start a revolution of your own.” This card game, which can be purchased on various websites, can also be printed by accessing the webpage: https://www.futuresofeurope.org/manifesto in the “OG edition,” “Art and AI edition,” and “Tech edition,” thus making it easily accessible.
“Manifesto Machine” is the name of a “web app that enables the user to drag and drop fragments from well-known manifestos, along with graphic design options that include eye-catching colour schemes and dramatic fonts” (Hanna and Ashby 28). Such digital tools actively promote the engagement with, or rather, repurposing or “hacking” of earlier manifestos. Both the “Manifesto Machine” as well as the card game “MANIFESTO!” have two important features in common: They build on a pre-selected plethora of words and phrases (that have generally been inspired by past manifestos), as well as flashy colors, capital letters, and bold aesthetics. They exemplify the kind of formal recycling and reworking of established forms of revolutionary writing that has come to characterize the manifesto genre in the 21st century.
The “Manifesto Machine” (Ashby et al. 559-562), which invites users to assemble their own manifestos from a set of pre-formulated components, captures a key tension in contemporary uses of the form. On the one hand, it allows users to draw on the inflammatory rhetoric of past manifestos and their bold claims, militant tone, and declarative urgency, thus offering a kind of playful empowerment through past radical language. On the other hand, the very structure of the game reduces the manifesto to a series of interchangeable building blocks, exposing how easily its once-revolutionary rhetoric can be modularized, rebranded, and repurposed. This gamification highlights the manifesto’s increasing function as a stylistic template rather than a tool for genuine political rupture. The phenomenon parallels the rise of brand manifestos4 in marketing, where the genre’s rhetorical strategies—its emotional appeal, collective “we,” and calls to action—are deployed not to incite revolution, but to sell identities and lifestyles. In both cases, the manifesto becomes a flexible and highly commodifiable format: more about affect and form than ideology.
Martine Syms’s “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” (2013, 2014, 2015): Intertextuality, Hacking, Parody, and Artistic Networks
First published online by the digital art organization Rhizome in 2013, Martine Syms’s satirical “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” (2013, 2014, 2015) is a call for a specific kind of Black art — namely “mundane Afrofuturist art.” It was republished on The Third Rail in 2014 in a slightly different format and broadcast as a video manifesto in 2015. “Afrofuturism,” a term coined by Mark Dery in his 1993 essay “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,”5 can be defined as an aesthetic and a framework for critical theory that “combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs” (Womack 9). While Afrofuturism as a movement and an aesthetic has become increasingly popular in recent years — Marvel’s Black Panther franchise being the most well-known example — cultural critic and artist Martine Syms emphasizes the limits of the emancipatory character associated with Afrofuturism in her manifesto. Criticizing unexamined or problematic tropes, “alternative histories” and “revisionist histories,” references to Egyptology and figures in popular culture like Sun Ra and Janelle Monaé, she instead encourages her readers to engage in a “new focus on black humanity” (4) and “an emotionally true, vernacular reality” (4). In a 2016 interview with The Guardian, Syms explains her rejection of the Afrofuturist label and her reason behind writing the manifesto: “I was a black person using technology so in this one year I kept getting invited to all these Afrofuturist events. […] And I was not really feeling it. I thought some of the claims were just a little too self-serious” (qtd. in Anyangwe). After spontaneously deciding to write a “mundane science fiction manifesto about Afrofuturism,” she “went home and did it. It took like five minutes” (qtd. in Williams).
I use Martine Syms’s manifesto as an example to illustrate how many contemporary manifestos self-consciously inscribe themselves into a tradition of manifesto writing, are a response to specific manifestos, and increasingly use digital spaces for their dissemination. But Syms’s manifesto also shows how familiar the genre has become—so familiar, in fact, that it can be easily repurposed or parodied. Her work parodies the manifesto’s declarative tone while questioning its radical potential, turning its formal conventions into both a critique and a tool. Her manifesto performs a “we,” but does so with irony, using the recognizable tropes of the genre to question its own authority.
Syms’s manifesto “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” (2013) is a response to a prior manifesto, namely Geoff Ryman et al.’s “The Mundane Manifesto” (2004), from the 2004 Clarion West workshop. Syms’s manifesto is thus engaging in a kind of dialogue with Ryman’s manifesto by using the basic structure, similar headings, and some key phrases, while rewriting it for her specific goals of mundane Afrofuturist art. The appropriation of another text positions this manifesto within a “hacking” aesthetic that is increasingly fashionable in contemporary art and literature — and what used to simply be called parody. In order to understand the aesthetics of Syms’s manifesto, we need to also look at Ryman’s manifesto. Both manifestos start in a similar way:
The undersigned, being pissed off and needing a tight girdle of discipline to restrain our sf imaginative silhouettes, are temporarily united in the following actions. (Ryman et al., “The Mundane Manifesto”)
The undersigned, being alternately pissed off and bored, need a means of speculation and asserting a different set of values with which to re-imagine the future. In looking for a new framework for black diasporic artistic production, we are temporarily united in the following actions. (Syms, “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto”)
In their manifesto, Ryman et al. argue for a science fiction which is centered on science and technologies that focus on humans and the earth we are inhabiting instead of on aliens, spaceships, and intergalactic travel. Syms, on the other hand, articulates the goal of finding “a new framework for black diasporic artistic production.” Like Ryman et al., she writes that “we are temporarily united in the following action.”
Both Ryman and Syms repeatedly use the personal pronoun “we” and possessive pronoun “our” in their manifestos. At the heart of the manifesto, whether earnest or parodic, is the invocation of the first-person plural. The declaration of a “we” in opposition to a “they” is what unites the genre across its many iterations. This collective voice is the manifesto’s defining aesthetic move: a fantasy of unity and rupture, of speaking together against something. Whether it is meant sincerely or mocked through exaggeration, the effect is the same; it constructs a rhetorical “we” that performs solidarity. In this way, the manifesto becomes a kind of game, with rules and moves as predictable as any board game or deck of cards.
The first section of Ryman’s manifesto, “The Mundanes recognize,” is followed by specific admissions, which are all introduced by the word “That” and which focus on the real-life unlikelihood of common science fiction tropes, namely “interstellar travel,” “a universe abundant with worlds as hospitable to life as this Earth,” “alien intelligences,” “interstellar trade,” and “whole alternative universes.” The first section of Syms’s manifesto picks up on points in Ryman’s manifesto, but relates them to the African American experience and Afrofuturism., “***The Mundane Afrofuturists recognize that:***,” focuses on space travel, outer space, cyberspace, the Middle Passage, and the legacies of colonialism, and Syms intertwines artistic productions with real life.
***The Mundane Afrofuturists recognize
that:***We did not originate in the cosmos.
The connection between Middle Passage and
space travel is tenuous at best.Out of five hundred thirty-four space travelers,
fourteen have been black. An all-black
crew is unlikely.Magic interstellar travel and/or the wondrous
communication grid can lead to an
illusion of outer space and cyberspace as
egalitarian.This dream of utopia can encourage us to
forget that outer space will not save us
from injustice and that cyberspace was prefigured
upon a “master/slave” relationship.While we are often Othered, we are not
aliens.Though our ancestors were mutilated, we are
not mutants.Post-black is a misnomer.
Post-colonialism is too.
The most likely future is one in which we
only have ourselves and this planet.
Instead of outer space, Syms tries to direct our focus back to earth and our real, mundane lives. The antithetic sentence “While we are often Othered, we are not aliens” seems to engage with Mark Dery’s text “Black to the Future” (1993), where African-Americans are referred to as the “descendants of alien abductees” (180). The sentence “cyberspace was prefigured / upon a ‘master/slave’ relationship” alludes to both the actual “master-slave”-relationship in the United States and the hierarchical communication model used in various technical and computing contexts that is actually referred to as a “master-slave model,” where one device or process controls one or more other devices or processes.
Syms’s “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” offers a compelling intervention into the manifesto tradition by turning the genre against itself. This is a pertinent example of parody not as mere mockery, but as a serious mode of formal critique. Parody, after all, functions as a kind of aesthetic taxonomy—it identifies, isolates, and exaggerates the conventions of a form in order to expose their ideological underpinnings. In Syms’s case, the conventions being targeted are those of both the traditional political manifesto and the more recent genre of Afrofuturist manifestos, which often rely on utopian abstraction, speculative fantasy, and a collectivist rhetoric of transcendence. By calling her work “mundane,” Syms performs a crucial inversion: the “mundane” here does not mean dull or unimportant, but rather anti-escapist. It insists on the material, the present, the lived. It refuses to indulge in the fantasy of a unified, rebellious “we” marching toward a futuristic liberation that sidesteps the complexities of the present moment.
In this sense, “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” is not just a parody of Afrofuturism; it is a meta-manifesto—a manifesto about what manifestos do, and what they too often fail to do. It highlights the genre’s reliance on declarative authority and sweeping claims, only to question whether such postures are still viable, especially in the fragmented, post-utopian landscape of the 21st century. Syms seems to suggest that building an imagined collective on the foundation of speculative fantasy is not just delusional—it is self-defeating, because it bypasses the difficult but necessary work of forging solidarity in the real, flawed, and mundane world. In this way, her work invites us to rethink how art, identity, and politics might converge in forms that are self-aware, critically engaged, and rooted in the present rather than reaching for escape.
The second section of Ryman et al.’s “The Mundane Manifesto,” namely “The Mundanes Rejoice in” is followed by the sentence: “The bonfire of unexamined and unjustified sf tropes that these recognitions piles up and sets [sic!] alight. / The bonfire of the stupidities includes, but not exclusively.” This metaphor points to the revolutionary, rebellious, incendiary performativity often showcased by manifestos.6 The first science fiction trope Ryman et al. want to burn is aliens: “Aliens: specifically those aliens who act like feudal Japanese/American Indians/Tibetan Buddhists/Nazis or who look or behave like human beings except for latex.” Further tropes to be burnt include “[a]liens who speak English,” “[f]lying saucers,” and technology that defies the rules of logic or relativity.
The second section of Syms’s “Mundane Afrofuturist manifesto” also takes up this idea of burning problematic tropes: “***The Mundane Afrofuturists rejoice in: ***” is followed by the sentences: “Piling up unexamined and hackneyed tropes, / and setting them alight. / Gazing upon their bonfire of the / Stupidities, which includes, but is not / exclusively limited to:”
[…]
Magical negroes;
Enormous self-control in light of
great suffering;
Great suffering as our natural state
of existence;
Inexplicable skill in the martial
arts;
Reference to Wu Tang;
Reference to Sun Ra;
[…]
Syms names key figures of the Afrofuturist movement such as Sun Ra and his Egyptian mythology. “Magical negroes” brings to mind characters like John Coffey in The Green Mile (1999), who has supernatural healing abilities. Syms evokes these references in an attempt to deflate or parody these fantasies of rebellion, which is another way of parodying the manifesto itself.
The third sections of both manifestos, both titled “We also recognize,” are followed by the words “The harmless fun that these and all the other Stupidities have brought to millions of people. / The harmless fun that burning the Stupidities will bring to millions of people.” The parallel sentence structure creates a playful tone. While both Ryman and Syms emphasize that “Earth is all we have,” Ryman suggests focusing on “robotics, virtual realities, enhanced genomes, nanotechnology, quantum mechanics…Please continue”; Syms instead suggest the following: “imagining a world without fantasy / bolt-holes: no portals to the Egyptian kingdoms, / no deep dives to Drexciya, no flying / Africans to whisk us off to the Promised / Land.” Here, Syms is making a reference to Drexciya and to Sun Ra’s fascination with Egypt. The Detroit electro duo “Drexciya,” 7 consisting of James Stinson and Gerald Donald, created the myth of a black underwater society in the 1990s.
The fourth section of Ryman et al.’s manifesto, “The Mundanes Promise,” is followed by the promise to “produce a collection of mundane science fiction consisting of stories that follow these rules,” for example “No interstellar travel,” “No aliens unless the connection is distant, difficult, tenuous, and expensive,” “No alternative universes.” The anaphoric sentence structure — all the promises are introduced by the word “No” — suggests very clear rules. The fourth section of Syms’s manifesto, “***The Mundane Afrofuturists promise***,” and the sentence “To produce a collection of Mundane Afrofuturist literature that follows these rules,” is followed by a list of thirteen points that are to be avoided, which are also introduced by the word “No.” Syms lists rules such as “1. No interstellar travel […]”, “2. No inexplicable end to racism […],” “8. No alternative universes” as well as “11. No Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, or Bucks” and “13. No Mammies, Jezebels, or Sapphires.” Points 11 and 13 thus evoke the long list of pervasive racial stereotypes of Black people.
Both manifestos emphasize the participatory dimension, the intended engagement with the public, as well as the manifesto’s fleeting relevance and its shifting membership. Both attest to the flexibility or the iterability of the form. Ryman et al. and Syms repeatedly add phrases like “Continue at will,” for example to invite the reader to continue in the process of adding further tropes that should be burnt. The manifestos are “signed” by “Geoff Ryman; The Clarion West 2004 Class; & whomever will join us in Mundanity” and, respectively, by “Martine Syms & whomever will join me in the future of black imagination,” which sounds like an invitation to be part of this movement, and by extension, their manifesto.
Importantly, both manifestos end with the promise to burn the manifesto when it is no longer interesting or relevant. The temporal aspect of manifestos, and specifically of these two manifestos, is already alluded to in the beginning when the authors write that they are “temporarily united in the following actions.” The unity, which is also suggested by words like “The undersigned,” “The Mundanes,” or “the Mundane Afrofuturists” and the use of the personal pronoun “We” — which is characteristic for manifestos — is temporary. Instead of long-lasting community-, or identity-building, the authors and their imagined audiences are temporarily united in this call for a change in science fiction art and Black diasporic art. The authors thus engage in a performative act of emphasizing and anticipating their own possible short-livedness and fleeting relevance; the manifesto needs only to remain as long as it is still relevant to someone. A manifesto’s fleetingness — especially in the age of digital media — is particularly important in the case of Ryman et al.’s manifesto, since the original manifesto is no longer uploaded by Ryman on the internet. Instead, another user has uploaded it again. As he writes: “The above information was sourced from a page that no longer exists online. […] As far as I know, this is the only full transcribed copy of the manifest online” (“The Mundane”).
Importantly, Syms’s manifesto also includes visual material, three pictures depicting specific art/performance pieces that build a kind of third space, where — although not explicitly referenced in the text — , the images and the words of the manifesto are speaking together. One of the images is titled “Cuco Fusco: Observations of Predation in Humans: A Lecture by Dr. Zira, Animal Psychologist” (2013) and refers to a performance by Fusco, where she embodies a character from Planet of the Apes who gives a lecture on human behavior.
(Black) art manifestos such as Larry Neal’s essay “The Black Arts Movement” (1968), or more recent ones like D. Scott Miller’s “AFROSURREAL MANIFESTO: Black is the new black — a 21st Century Manifesto” (2009) and Reynaldo Anderson’s “Afrofuturism 2.0 and the Black Speculative Arts Movement: Notes on a Manifesto” (2016) all explicitly name and claim specific artists and texts in their manifestos, thus creating a network of artists that are (meant to be) part of the movement. Syms continues this trend of referencing artists in even more explicit ways. What is particularly striking about Syms’s manifesto is not only that it is establishing a discourse with Ryman et al.’s “The Mundane Manifesto” (2004) by using it as a template and that it alludes to Fusco’s performance art, but that it has also been published in a hybrid form with other works that feature interviews with specific artists.
In 2015, Martine Syms reworked “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” into the format of a 56-minute video8, which, as part of the Emmy-nominated art and culture series “Artbound,” was broadcast by the US channel PBS in season 7, episode 1. The film, directed by Syms herself, features in-depth interviews with writer Tisa Bryant, musician/producer Delroy Edwards, film programmer Erin Christovale and visual artist Nicole Miller, which are set in relation to Syms’s manifesto and her call for mundane art. Her manifesto is interwoven into this documentary-style film, which begins with Syms reading the beginning of her manifesto. She is sitting at a table, facing the camera and while she is reading, pictures of real-life events (such as a picture of astronauts in space), other media, and the interviewees themselves are shown. In the course of the video, scholars and artists like Rebecca Walker, The Borrowers, June Jordan, famous Black men reciting the alphabet on Sesame Street, Cornel West, Al Green, Terence Nance and Sanford Biggers (and Sanford’s work on quilts), and James T. Greene (who in connection with the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson made an interactive website “Where were you on this day?”) are mentioned.
While Syms is reading her manifesto, drawings, scribbles, and individual words from the manifesto are written over the video and sometimes partly cover her face. The effect is clear — the words, some of which are written in all-caps, and the drawings on top of the video form a kind of collage which is meant to illustrate (and make fun of) what she is reading. The manifesto genre, which has traditionally borrowed from the language of advertising, is connected to its visual aesthetic. In Syms’s 2015 film manifesto, the aesthetic no longer consists of just the written word but is an amalgamation of words, sounds, and visual images. Syms not only taps into manifesto conventions but also parodies the concept.
Directly linking her calls for a certain kind of art with artists who are already making “mundane Afrofuturist” art is a powerful — and efficient — form of creating artistic networks. This networking form of manifesto writing seems to be specifically characteristic for the 21st century. Martine Syms brings together artists like Delroy Edwards, Nicole Miller, Erin Christovale, and Tisa Bryant, who have read her manifesto and want to collaborate with her. She describes her manifesto as “an opportunity to get into a conversation with people,” noting that she “was interested in using it as a framework to talk about the work, and less about the severity of how it can appear” (qtd. in Williams). At the same time, she acknowledges the performative and playful nature of the form, adding, “there is a theatrical element to making claims that I’m interested in” (ibid.). Syms’s work from 2013 and 2014 (and the visual reworking of her manifesto in 2015) shows how manifestos are (inter-)connected, how they draw from each other and respond to each other (often tongue in cheek), thus bridging the gap between art and the public while entertaining their audience.
The Film Installation and Feature Film Manifesto (2015, 2017): The Aesthetics of a Decontextualized “Choir of Different Voices”
Another example of a parody of the manifesto genre is the German-Australian film installation Manifesto (2015), which pays homage to (and makes fun of) various important manifestos of the past century, especially art manifestos from around the pre-war era. A visually and verbally captivating presentation, Manifesto is a tribute to all the “isms” that shaped 20th century artistic movements and their associated manifestos: from Expressionism, Futurism and Suprematism to Dadaism, Surrealism, Situationism, Conceptualism and Minimalism. Written, produced, and directed by Julian Rosefeldt and starring Cate Blanchett, it was originally conceived as a multi-screen art installation that premiered in Australia at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) on December 9, 2015. Filmed in locations around Berlin, the installation was exhibited in Australia, Germany, the United States and Canada from 2015 to 2019. The exhibition totaled 130 minutes, whereas the running time of the feature film, which came out in 2015, was 94 minutes. While Syms dismantles the manifesto from within—stripping it of its utopian certainty and exposing its limitations through irony and understatement—Julian Rosefeldt takes a more theatrical approach, exaggerating the form’s rhetorical excess to the point of absurdity. If Syms offers a low-key, grounded anti-manifesto, Rosefeldt constructs a hyper-stylized, fragmented spectacle, using costume, setting, and role-play to highlight the manifesto’s status as pure performance.
Manifesto is a sort of hybrid reconfiguration of notable manifestos. Rosefeldt selected approximately 60 manifestos that he considered “the most fascinating and most recitable” or that he thought corresponded or complimented one another and “combined [them] into a kind of condensation” (qtd. in Tutton and Paton). In an interview from 2015, Rosefeldt explains that he was intrigued by the idea of alluding to “a collection of voices, a conversation” and recontextualizing those voices “into new monologues” (ibid.). He framed Manifesto as “a series of episodes that can be seen separately but that can also be seen together in their entirety, as a choir of different voices” (ibid.)
The film-installation, consisting of a four-minute prologue and twelve main segments that are each 10:30 minutes, combines various types of political and artistic manifestos from different time periods with comparatively contemporary scenes. The manifestos are depicted by focusing on twelve different characters (all played by Cate Blanchett), among them a homeless man, a broker, punk, CEO, funeral speaker, choreographer, puppeteer, worker at a garbage incineration plant, scientist, conservative mother, newsreader, reporter, and teacher. Manifesto does not indicate the names of the manifestos or their respective authors as it moves from sequence to sequence; instead, the viewer is immersed in a fast-paced aesthetic experience that through its juxtaposition of everyday experiences and bombastic declarations invites confusion, speculation, room for new interpretations, and humorous absurdity.
Where Syms deconstructs the manifesto from within—quietly undermining its radical posture through irony and restraint—Rosefeldt approaches the genre through theatrical excess. His film Manifesto stages historical manifestos in deliberately incongruous settings, performed by a single actor in a dozen conflicting roles, emphasizing not just the artifice of the manifesto but the play-acting quality of protest itself. The accompanying film poster deepens this critique: by presenting Cate Blanchett in costume as wildly divergent characters, it visualizes a fractured, performative “we” that can never be unified. These are not people who would storm the same barricade—they’re the curated fragments of identity and ideology that the manifesto claims to rally, but can no longer convincingly bind together. Rather than asserting revolutionary unity, Rosefeldt’s work parodies the genre’s promise of collectivity, revealing it instead as a collage of poses, scripts, and aestheticized ruptures. In this way, Manifesto doesn’t just quote manifestos—it performs their exhaustion.
To describe the aesthetics in Rosefeldt’s Manifesto, I will primarily focus on the prologue (Manifesto 00:00-4:29) and the first two segments (4:30-9:13; 9:14-12:15) of the 2017 feature film. Manifesto opens on a completely black screen. In stark white text, a dictionary-style definition of the word “manifesto” appears—complete with its phonetic transcription and grammatical category (“noun; plural: manifestos”). Beneath this minimalist display, a low, slightly dissonant string tone hums, subtly building tension and unease as the definition lingers onscreen. The black screen smoothly transitions into the next scene: a fuse slowly burning in front of a dark backdrop, accompanied by low thundering sounds (00:18–1:15) while Cate Blanchett’s voice begins to speak solemnly and poignantly from off-screen, adding a sense of gravity to the unfolding imagery. The first sentence uttered, “All that is solid melts into air,” is from the Communist Manifesto, thus fittingly grounding future manifesto excerpts.
All that is solid melts into air. To put out a manifesto, you must want ABC to form an aid against 1, 2, 3. To fly into a rage and sharpen your wings, to conquer and disseminate little abcs, and big ABCs, to sign, shout, swear, to prove your non plus ultra, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence. I’m against action, I’m for continuous contradiction, for affirmation, too. I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense. I am writing a manifesto because I have nothing to say. I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince. I have no right to drag others into my river. I oblige no one to follow me. And everyone practices his art in his own way, if he knows the joy that rises like arrows to the astral layers, or, that other joy that goes down into the minds of corpse-flowers and fertile spasms. Does anyone think he has found a psychic-based common to all mankind? How can one expect to put order into the chaos that constitutes that infinite and shapeless variation: Man! (Manifesto 1:15-2:44, emphasis added based on the actress’s enunciation)
The seriousness of Cate Blanchett’s tone stands in contrast to the words of the manifesto she is primarily citing from, namely Tristan Tzara’s 1918 “Dada Manifesto,” which embraces spontaneity, playfulness, contradictions, and absurdity — instead of systematic thought. The sentence “I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense” not only succinctly encapsulates the Dada movement, it also almost sounds like a nursery rhyme. “I am writing a manifesto because I have nothing to say,” inserted into this Dada excerpt, is in fact a fragment from Philippe Soupault’s Literature and the Rest (1920). Both the quoted sentence “I have no right to drag others into my river” from Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto” and the phrase “temporarily united in the following actions” from Syms’s “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” highlight a provisional, self-aware “we”—one that resists claiming lasting unity or total representation, yet still gestures toward collective action.
As Cate Blanchett exclaims “Man!” the flames surge with even greater intensity. The scene cuts to three elderly women standing beside a derelict building, lighting and launching fireworks into the sky, thus revealing the apparent source of the fire we have just witnessed. Their coy, gleeful laughter and playful exclamations (“This is so much fun!”) fill the air, adding a surprising and whimsical twist to the scene. While watching the flame and fuse burn, we expect an explosion, but it never happens. This is funny because, like many manifestos, the introductory scene builds up expectations but it ultimately does not quite follow through. The anticlimax is programmatic — this manifesto is not about revolution, but about fun. This is not a manifesto of revolt, but a declaration of delightful absurdity, performed in full parody and theatrical excess. The solemn tone of Cate Blanchett’s speech stands in stark contrast to the scene featuring the elderly women, and thus further encapsulates the aesthetic of the playful and the absurd. This juxtaposition creates a moment of comic relief which correspondents well with the aesthetics of “constant contradictions” propagated in the “Dada Manifesto.”
While the elderly women continue launching their fireworks, a homeless man pulling a cart (also portrayed by Cate Blanchett) walks into the frame. Suddenly, the screen cuts to black, now filled with the names of renowned manifesto authors, flashing in bold, oversized white letters, as well as the exclamations “ART REQUIRES TRUTH / NOT SINCERITY” and “ALL / CURRENT /ART / IS / FAKE.” While “truth” refers to the accuracy of a statement in relation to reality, “sincerity” concerns the speaker’s genuine belief or intent. The exclamations suggest that the manifesto is a performance disguised as sincerity—a set of conventions that mobilizes a “we” in the name of breaking down established forms. Its revolutionary power lies not in truth, but in the theatrical, parodic embrace of its own fakeness. The form can be parodied in the same way that any jargon of authenticity can be parodied. It only pretends to be sincere—the truth is that it is a performance. Revolution is an act of imagination, and art reveals that by reveling in its own fakeness. Accompanied by fast-paced drumming, the ticking sound of a clock, and eerie, dissonant sounds, the sequence unfolds in rapid, staccato cuts—jumping abruptly from one name to the next, and building tension. Interspersed are quick flashes of Cate Blanchett inhabiting the various roles she will embody throughout the film, creating a frenetic, disorienting rhythm that signals a shift in tone and pace.
The next scene (and first segment after the prologue) presents a bird’s-eye view of grey, abandoned-looking buildings. The scene evokes the remnants of a post-industrial world: spaces once driven by production, now abandoned and hollowed out. In this segment featuring the homeless man, Julian Rosefeldt has combined parts of various manifestos associated with a plethora of movements, namely Alexander Rodchenko’s “Manifesto of Suprematists and Non-Objective Painters” (1919), the Marxist ideology of the John Reed Club of New York’s “Draft Manifesto” (1932), Lucio Fontana’s “White Manifesto” (1946), which is connected to Spatialism, Constant Nieuwenhuys “Manifesto” (1948) and its Surrealist school of thought, as well as Guy Debord’s “Situationist Manifesto” (1960).
Again, as in the prologue, we hear Cate Blanchett’s poised voice speaking from the off, citing from the John Reed Club of New York and its Great Depression-era “Draft Manifesto” (1932) and Constant Nieuwenhuys’s artistic “Manifesto” (1948):
An old world is dying, a new one is being born. Capitalist civilization, which has dominated the economic, political and cultural life of continents is in the process of decay. It is now breeding new and devastating wars. The prevailing economic crisis is placing greater and greater burdens upon the mass of the world’s population, upon those who work with hand or brain. The present crisis has stripped capitalism naked. It stands more revealed than ever as a system of robbery and fraud. Unemployment and terror, starvation and war. The general crisis of capitalism is reflected in its culture. The economic and political machinery of the bourgeoisie is in decay. Its philosophy, its literature, and its art are bankrupt. [The camera shows a huge pile of rubble next to what looks like a broken-down bridge.] In this period of change, the role of the artist can only be that of the revolutionary [we see a small monkey sitting on the rubble], it is his duty to destroy the last remnants of an empty irksome aesthetic, arousing the creative instincts still slumbering unconscious in the human mind. Our art is the art of a revolutionary period. Simultaneously the reaction of a world going under and the herald of a new era. (Manifesto 6:40-8:22)
The camera gradually zooms in on a solitary figure pulling a cart—revealed to be the homeless man previously introduced. He comes to a halt, and the frame tightens around his unkempt body as he drunkenly mumbles, “what a baboon,” thus interrupting Cate Blanchett’s poised voice from the off. This utterance again introduces an aesthetic of humorous ambiguity: high seriousness is followed with bathos or absurdity to expose the constructedness or pretension of ideological discourse. The reference of the phrase “What a baboon” remains deliberately ambiguous: it may point to the literal monkey perched on a hill of rubble or serve as a mocking commentary on the author of the solemn ideological speech we have just heard—likely both. The humor lies in the jarring tonal shift and the absurd juxtaposition: after a heavy, earnest monologue full of ideological conviction, the sudden mention of a monkey (by an intoxicated homeless man) introduces a deflationary punchline. It works as parody by undermining the speech’s authority, suggesting that its high-minded rhetoric may be no more meaningful—or perhaps no more evolved—than the chatter of a monkey. This satirical twist calls attention to the theatricality and self-seriousness of ideological posturing, using absurdity to expose its fragility.
The homeless man then proceeds to ascend a dilapidated structure—visually ambiguous, suspended between the appearance of a crumbling staircase and a broken bridge—it may serve as metaphor for the manifestos themselves. As the man climbs and weakly pulls his cart, he continues to speak in a slurred, nearly unintelligible voice in a Scottish (or perhaps Irish) accent, while quoting from Alexander Rodchenko’s “Manifesto of Suprematists and Non-Objective Painters” (1919): “Glorify the revolution aloud as the only engine of life. We glooorify the vibrations of the inventors. Young and strong, they carry the flaming torch of the revolution” (Manifesto 8:36-8:52). The juxtaposition between this declamatory speech (both by Cate Blanchett’s poised voice off-screen and by the intoxicated homeless man on-screen) and the visual landscape of decay, i.e. abandoned structures, detritus, and isolation, suggests the afterlife of ideological systems in a post-industrial, late-capitalist world. More importantly, this moment also invokes what Slavoj Žižek describes as the “ideological sublime” (1989), a grand gesture emptied of real political traction, its repetition by a marginal figure rendering it absurd and spectral. Once the homeless man has arrived on the platform, he raises his arm and bellows: “This is the place — for the rebellious [lifts arm high into the air] spirits. The petty and materialistic [waves both arms wildly around] army of … oh be off with ya [grunts]” (Manifesto 8:55-9:04); hardly discernible, the homeless man is quoting from Rodchenko’s manifesto. The man’s increasingly incoherent delivery in combination with his marginal status expose the hollow theatricality of the revolutionary rhetoric — or at least challenges it — recalling Guy Debord’s 1967 analysis of spectacle: the transformation of political and historical processes into images divorced from social praxis, which is perhaps what the manifesto has become, or what it always was.9
As the homeless man walks away, the scene transitions into a bird’s eye view of a huge grid-like office space (which turns out to be a trading hall), the sterile uniformity of the layout evoking both bureaucratic efficiency and a sense of dehumanization. We hear the deep sound of string instruments, interspersed with the high-pitched sound of phones ringing, and other beeping sounds. Again, we hear Cate Blanchett’s voiceover (now in an American accent) citing not only from Filippo Tomasso Marinetti’s 1909 “Futurist Manifesto” but also from various Futurist manifestos published in 1909, 1910, and 1913 (which particularly in Italy had a strong connection to fascism), all meshed together into one new manifesto:
My friends and I stayed up all night, debating at the utmost boundaries of logic and filling up masses of paper with our frenetic writings. At long last, all the myths and mystical ideas are behind us. We believe that this wonderful world has been further enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. We want to sing about the love of danger, about the use of energy and recklessness as common daily practice. We intend to glorify aggressive action, life at the double, the slap, the punching fist. We wish to glorify war and beautiful ideas worth dying for. The suffering of a man is of the same interest to us as the suffering of an electric lamp. (Manifesto 9:41-10:32)
While Cate Blanchett is speaking off-screen, the image cuts to a mid-shot of Blanchett in the role of a trader. Seated behind a computer displaying stock market data and trading interfaces, she is chewing gum and speaking animatedly into a phone, her gestures brisk yet stylized and embodying visual clichés of economic productivity. While the amalgamation of Futurist manifestos that are being cited off-screen call for the celebration of violence and speed, the pace of the scene is slightly slowed, introducing a subtle dissonance between the trader’s movements and the temporality of the film. The trader’s speech is almost entirely muted, underscoring the performative emptiness of the gesture itself; a symbol of communication without substance, it is echoing Franco Berardi’s critique of “semiocapitalism” (2009). As we switch to the bird’s eye view again, the ambient hum of the trader’s voices grows louder, while Cate Blanchard’s voice continues from off-screen:
We will destroy the cult of the past, the ancients, and academic formalism. We want our country free from the endless number of museums that everywhere cover her like countless graveyards. Shit to Florence, Montmartre, and Munich. Shit to dictionaries. Good-taste-isms. Orientalism, Academicism. Shit to Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Goethe. Beshitted dilettantisms. Shit to Montaigne, Wagner, Beethoven, Whitman and Baudelaire. [yells cockily] Look at us! We’re not exhausted yet. Our hearts feel no weariness, for they feed on fire, on hatred and on speed. Let the reign of the divine electric light begin at last. Make room for youth, for violence, for daring. (Manifesto 10:47-11:44)
The camera gradually pulls back to reveal the full scale of the trading hall: a vast, multi-level space filled with hundreds of traders stationed at identical desks. The lingering wide shot of the mirrored trading floors captures the overwhelming, dehumanizing order of highly systematized financial labor before cutting abruptly to the next scene. The film does not just present manifestos, it stages them—transforming radical rhetoric into theatrical play-acting. These scenes are deliberately stylized, resonating with the performative quality of the manifesto itself. As each text is removed from its historical moment and performed one after another, the impact becomes less about specific political content and more about repetition as form. The manifestos begin to function as a kind of rhetorical exercise or invocation, marked by accumulated intensity but flattened meaning.
While in the first segment there is somewhat of a connection between the contents of the manifestos and the filmic setting, this becomes increasingly less evident in other segments. The sixth segment, for example, features a funeral procession followed by an unconventional eulogy. As the procession, accompanied by a traditional funeral band, moves toward the cemetery, Cate Blanchett appears among the mourners, dressed in a black costume and hat. Upon arrival at the burial site, she steps forward to deliver the eulogy, most of which is composed as a bricolage of excerpts drawn from various Dadaist manifestos. Her delivery is solemn, at times emotionally charged—her voice occasionally breaking under the weight of the moment. She begins with the line: “One dies as a hero or as an idiot — which is the same thing. The only word that is not ephemeral is the word death.” While the initial phrase (“One dies as a hero”) might pass as a dramatic but not entirely atypical opening to a eulogy, the continuation signals a sharp departure from convention. As her speech unfolds, the tone and content grow increasingly unorthodox, nonsensical and hilarious:
We see everything. We love nothing. I am against systems. The most acceptable system is in principle to have none. Abolition of logic. Dada. Abolition of memory. Dada. Abolition of archaeology. Dada. Abolition of the future. Dada. Dada [her voice quivers, and nearly breaks, she pauses] is still shit. But from now on, [pause] from now on we want to shit in different colors to decorate the art zoo with all of the consular flags. Dada is neither madness nor wisdom nor irony. Dada means nothing. [less loudly, like an aside] And you were all idiots. Yeah, you’re all complete idiots made from the alcohol of purified sleep.
Funerals, typically imbued with religious notions of an afterlife (which is also hinted at by the presence of a religious figure in the film segment), stand in stark contrast to the text’s ideal of the abolition of all things. Cate Blanchett’s meticulously composed appearance as a mourner — formal black attire, poised makeup, precise delivery, and a quivering and at times emotionally charged voice — sharply contrasts with the manifesto’s whimsical, bombastic, and at times vulgar, or absurd content. Mixing revolutionary rhetoric (“No more painters. […] Enough of all this imbecility! No more anything! No more anything. [yelling] Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!!!”) with profanity (“shit,” “idiots,” or “Before I rip off your ugly, incontinent, cheesy little dick”) and fragmented slogans, the eulogy creates a dissonant tension between solemn performance and chaotic excess, creating a darkly absurd, humorously subversive effect.
While certain passages of the Manifesto feature film are identifiable — at least by manifesto-afficionados — all passages of this manifesto collage remain uncontextualized. Manifesto ultimately leaves the viewers in a state of trying to make sense of what they are viewing. Only at the very end of the film during the credits does Manifesto provide the titles for each section (e.g. “SITUATIONISM — Homeless man”; “FUTURISM — broker”). Instead of being “correctly” contextualized in a cultural/historical setting, the manifestos that Rosefeldt uses are instead presented in a new, and often modern or even futuristic setting. However, the film does more than simply list the artistic movements in the credits; by arranging and presenting the manifestos in a specific sequence, it guides viewers toward a particular interpretation that critically assesses and judges the manifestos’s content and impact.
As viewers, we do not learn anything about the cultural or historical background behind any of the manifestos referenced, neither about the Communist manifesto, the Futurist, or Dadaist manifesto. In fact, while they are being performed, we are not even told which manifesto it is. This, precisely, may be the point — we learn only about their interchangeable forms. However, perhaps more important than the individual words and the actual context is arguably the aesthetic experience that is transmitted in each scene teeming with bombastic declarations: anger, boldness, idealism, revolutionary fervor and conviction, and a call for a particular kind of art — on a meta-level absurdity, contradictions, irony, self-importance, and naiveté. Intricate bricolage bordering on absurd theater, the film is more than a parody, it is a surreal film experience.
In a 2017 interview with the Guardian, Julian Rosefeldt states that “[s]omething that started as a love declaration to these writings has almost become a call for action. You feel like it’s time for action again” (qtd. in Rose). Rosefeldt’s description points to a lingering emotional and rhetorical power in historical manifestos, and a nostalgia for a time when radical language felt urgent and consequential. Peter Schneemann’s analysis, however, complicates this reading by emphasizing the way Manifesto foregrounds the form itself, highlighting how stylized and codified the genre has become. Schneemann writes: “Although the paratextual discourse of the installation positions itself as a homage and as a kind of critical review of the political potential of the avant-garde rhetoric, a different, much more radical question surfaces. Through explicit play with the manifesto’s formal rule system, a certain aestheticizing, in the sense of over forming or super shaping, becomes evident” (215). Schneemann’s comments point to how the film does not just use manifesto language—it magnifies and exaggerates its structure until it becomes the subject of critique. In doing so, the work shifts from being a simple homage to something more reflexive: a meta-manifesto that both celebrates and dismantles the genre. This tension between sincere admiration and critical deconstruction suggests that Manifesto is not only about what manifestos say, but how they say it, and what happens when their formal power begins to outweigh their political content. The bricolage highlights the manifesto form to both parody it and prompt critical reflection. While it playfully exposes the genre’s conventions, it does not lose sight of the serious existential issues at its core. In this way, Manifesto arguably raises a more radical question than the one it pretends to ask: Can the language of revolution survive its aestheticization? Or has the manifesto, like so many radical forms, become a genre like any other — available for remix, parody, and display, but no longer capable of rupture?
In a 2017 interview with Port magazine, Rosefeldt explains his choice in pairing together various manifestos: “Of course, it’s quite disrespectful towards the original writing […]. Within these circles there is as much contradiction as agreement. But in art, as in history and fashion, everything repeats itself. Ideas come up, disappear for a while, and then forty years later have their rebirth” (qtd. in Francis). At the end of Rosefeldt’s Manifesto, after the final segment — just when one might expect the credits to roll — snippets from the various monologues begin to reappear, peu à peu, overlapping and gradually filling the previously black screen. Cate Blanchett’s voice emerges in multiple tonalities, layered and varied, and each character faces the viewer directly. This last scene quite literally becomes a “choir of different voices,” forming an eerie incantation or chant that becomes entirely indiscernible and blurs the boundaries between performance and manifesto. The overlapping voices create a layered sonic texture that at times verges on harmony — a dissonant, uncanny chorus that transforms Blanchett’s multiple personas into a singular, collective invocation (Manifesto 1:32:18-1:33:36). To sum up, Rosefeldt’s film Manifesto illustrates how the manifesto genre is a convention-laden, interconnected, self-referential genre that invites both parody and meta-reflection. Even completely decontextualized and dehistoricized, the aesthetics of this manifesto — this “choir of different voices” is still tangible.
Conclusion
Martine Syms’s “Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” (2013, 2015) and Julian Rosefeldt’s art-installation and feature film Manifesto (2015, 2017) are just two of many examples of contemporary manifestos that deliberately inscribe themselves in a tradition of manifesto writings by making reference to specific earlier manifestos. The book-length feminist manifesto Feminism for the 99%, (2019), for example, also makes explicit reference to the “Combahee River Collective Statement” — a Black intersectional manifesto from 1974 — in the epigraph, and to the Communist Manifesto in the “Postface”; Charles Blow’s Black Power Manifesto (2021) repeatedly references other Black Power manifestos such as the “Declaration of Independence” by the “Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika” (RNA) (127). Most recently, on June 13, 2025, a modern anti‑fascist intellectuals’s manifesto, titled “A Century Later: A Renewed Open Letter Against the Return of Fascism” (June 13, 2025), was published on various news media outlets to protest the global rise of fascism. On the website stopreturnfascism.org, it is advertised as “The Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, 100 years later,” thus a deliberate link to Benedetto Croce’s 1925 “Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals” is deliberately drawn.
Martine Syms’s online manifesto “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” showcases the popularity of the genre. It also illustrates the interconnectedness and flow of ideas between different artists and their manifestos, showing how past manifestos are often used as templates for contemporary manifestos. Syms’s manifesto feature film, which came out in 2015, illustrates the increasing importance of visual media in (online) manifestos and it shows how writing a manifesto, a convention-laden genre, can lead to new artistic cooperations or networks. Ironically, while these collectives reject the status quo (one set of conventions), they are nonetheless mobilized by other sets of conventions.
While Syms’s manifesto illustrates how manifestos are often written as a response to prior manifestos, Julian Rosefeldt’s art installation Manifesto (2015) takes this premise to a different level. By rearranging such a large number of manifestos in connection with each other, this dialogue — or rather “choir of different voices” — takes on a specific form in the spaces of the art installation, where all segments were shown at the same time, further intensifying as well as complicating the idea of dialogue. Rosefeldt’s art-installation and in particular his film, available to a larger audience than the art-installation, shows how manifestos can be arranged so that their mood and aesthetics are clear to any viewer even if they do not understand the cultural and/or historical context. Completely decontextualized, the aesthetics are still palpable. The manifesto genre has become a sort of hyper-reflexive genre: writers are acutely aware of its historical lineage and aesthetic, and it has become a hybrid or “meta-genre” that constantly self-references and/or comments on its status as a manifesto. In the 21st century, the manifesto functions as a recognizable genre, complete with familiar tropes and formal conventions ripe for imitation. In contemporary art, parody serves not just as a stylistic choice but as a critical methodology that questions how revolutionary the manifesto form has become—or ever was. Manifestos like Martine Syms’s “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto,” Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto, and various digital “manifesto games” participate in a broader meta-manifesto phenomenon, critiquing the genre by performing it with deliberate self-awareness and parody.
Works Cited
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