Buying blood diamonds and altering global capitalism. Mads Brügger as unruly artivist in The Ambassador

Abstract

This article argues that it is necessary to distinguish between different modalities of globalisation to ensure that we do not simply equate globalisation with global capitalism. Following this, this article conducts a study of the way in which Mads Brügger's documentary film The Ambassador challenges global inequality in relation to finance and mobility. This critique of global inequality is staged through a peculiar “unruly artivist” provocation. Mads Brügger fictionalises his character and over-identifies with the corrupt diplomat seeking to buy and trade blood diamonds. The film is unruly because it rejects any explicit ethical claims and norms of participation, thus reproducing the self-same patterns of inequality that it seeks to document. This article studies the film as an unruly documentary that applies satire, cartoon aesthetics, and culture jamming as its artivist strategy. This strategy is one of provocation. The provocation enters the mediatised public sphere, in which it simultaneously is condemned and works as a critique of the global mobility and financial inequality that it portrays.Camilla Møhring Reestorff is assistant professor at the Department of Aesthetics and Communication at the University of Aarhus and honorary research fellow at The University of Melbourne's School of Culture and Communication. She has done research on nationalism and the intertwining of art, activism, and politics in the Danish “culture war.” Her publications include work on contemporary cultural politics and political art, for instance in Globalizing Art: Negotiating Place, Identity and Nation in Contemporary Nordic Art (Thomsen and Ørjasæter 2011), and fictionality (Jacobsen, Kierkegaard, Kraglund, Nielsen, Stage and Reestorff 2013).