Entropy: [Dis]obedience

Statement

Entropy: [Dis]obedience is a research work that looks the reaction movements and behaviors against the authoritarian power in Europe during the 20th century. It is a dissident project that revolves around theories of power. It could be defined as something that comes later, a stage revisited, interpreted, although it maintains its essence of dichotomy: obedience and disobedience.

The series title refers to the concept of power that Hannah Arendt and Stanley Milgram exposed in the 1960s. In 1961, following the trial of the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, directly responsible for the implementation and execution of the plan, known as the final solution, Hannah Arendt published the book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt argued that Eichmann was not a psychopath, nor was he specially trained for cruelty. He was an ordinary person, a bureaucrat obeying orders from his superiors, without empathy for the terrible consequences of his actions. Arendt does not believe him innocent, nor does he exempt him from responsibility, but places the emphasis of blame on the power structure, on the mass, as a single entity without individual entities. It is what he called The Banality of Evil.

Based on this controversial Arendt theory, several studies spread in Europe, such as the experiment that Stanley Milgram carried out in 1961 or the one known as Stanford prison. Milgram conducted a series of experiments on obedience to authority at Yale University. An experimenter tries to exercise his authority over the participating subject to explore his level of rupture with obedience. The results of the experiment yielded highly controversial results: more than 60% of the participants obeyed to the end, believing they were supplying an innocent victim with fatal 450 volt electric shocks.

The series also explores behaviors that move between obedience and disobedience. 20th century is traversed such as the journey of Spanish soldiers who began in the republican army at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and later went into exile to France to join the French Resistance or the French army. La Nueve was created, the Ninth Company of the French Army integrated into the 2nd Armored Division, formed almost entirely by Spanish Republicans. They fought fascism, landed in Normandy, and liberated Paris in 1944.