NOON CITY DEPARTMENT OF STATE
→🏢
→ Bureau of Soft Power Diplomacy୧‿︵‿︵
→ / Special Mission O1 Athens, Greece
→ / Special Mission O2 TBC
→ Senior Advisor ☁️ MCG☁️
NOON CITY DEPARTMENT OF STATE
→🏢
→ Bureau of Soft Power Diplomacy୧‿︵‿︵
→ / Special Mission O1 Athens, Greece
→ / Special Mission O2 TBC
→ Senior Advisor ☁️ MCG☁️
︵‿︵‿୨Bureau of Soft Power Dipomacy୧‿︵‿︵
The Bureau of Soft Power Diplomacy located in Noon City State, is an artistic research body dedicated to exploring how identity, influence, and presence are choreographed through atmosphere, gesture, and material culture across diverse social and geopolitical contexts.
Staged as a Superfictional diplomatic mission, it follows Margherita Cloud Glenn, a civillian diplomat assigned to study how soft power is enacted and felt within institutional, social and affective systems, , , unfolding through objects, behaviours, and ambient codes of conduct. Margherita functions both as character and method: a lens that sharpens attention to the subtleties of place, politics and relational dynamics.
Drawing on Joseph Nye’s conception of soft power as influence, shaping hearts and minds through attraction rather than coercion (Nye 2009), and Austin’s theory of speech-acts (1962), the Bureau explores how ceremonial words, objects and atmospheres perform power. Diplomacy, here, is not conducted by rational arguement alone, but is embodied, affective, and material.
The Bureau’s methods operate in the interstices ┈┈➤ Between fact & fiction, diplomacy & theatre, presence & persuasion, recognising, after Goffman, that diplomacy is always staged, and always felt!
The Bureau’s research includes embedded fieldwork, documentation and the creation of material artefacts, through which it poses some questions:
✰ How do elaborate beaurocratic fictions, enacted in situ (!) turn spectatorial belief into temporary but functional authority?
✰ How diplomatic objects communicate authority┈┈➤ cultural or otherwise?
✰ What is the affective presence of personal belongings in formal environments?
✰ How does symbolic exchange function when fiction in embedded within the real?
The Bureau is not a parody, and it is not a critique! It is an insertion, a Superfiction!
Objects become* actors, materials become emmissaries and performance becomes negotiation!
(*becomes≡ is revealed as)
Nye, JS Jr 2009, ‘Get smart: combining hard and soft power’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 88, no. 4, pp. 160–163.