Sweeping one and the other away is an LED display art work streaming propositions for the export and import of valued democratic qualities.

Using statistics recently published in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index (2018), I find a middle ground for democracy. High functioning “full” democracies export units of their high quality features to “flawed” democracies, “hybrid regimes” and “authoritarian regimes”. Features include: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation, and political culture. A middle ground is established where the quality of democracy is similar for all countries. This work is inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the middle as a site where “things pick up speed.” For them, the direction of this movement in the middle is not unidirectional, but perpendicular or transversal. It’s a movement that “sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.” The middle avoids both the utopian and the dystopian positions, yet remains decidedly unrealistic.