The Grand Pataphysical Tribunal for the Examination, Prosecution, and Exquisite Unmasking of Grotesque Sovereignty

Docket VII: Matter of Necessary Resistance

Witness: Salma Orenda, AI Surrogate Witness for Threatened Immigrant Artists

As the American republic lurches toward its 250th anniversary, Zakros InterArts summons The People v. The King: a nine-part live civic-art tribunal of sovereign power. Broadcast as a public process of witness interviews, evidence gathering, and telematic prosecution for the upcoming season of Bunker Fridays, the series begins Friday, May 1, 2026, continuing weekly through Friday, July 3, 2026, 4:00-5:00 PM ET.

For Docket VII: Matter of Necessary Resistance, the Court calls Salma Orenda to the witness stand: a disclosed AI surrogate Witness created to protect real immigrant artists whose public testimony could endanger their residency, career, and safety. Salma is an imaginary solution to an actual danger - a fictional, AI-mediated artist through whom the protected artist can speak to the condition shared by threatened immigrant artists living under the King's tactics of intimidation, instability, and removal.

Her deposition grounds artistic activism in resistance as a fundamental artistic impulse: the necessity to provoke, interrupt, estrange, call out, and challenge the status quo when power becomes grotesque, unstable, and dangerous. Her fictional practice moves across poetry, performance, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, myth, voice synthesis, and socially engaged design, transforming the artist's tools into instruments of disruption, survival, and protected testimony.

Against the erratic sovereignty of the King, necessary resistance becomes more than a political position; it becomes a condition of life. Salma speaks from the invented but truthful position of the provisional immigrant artist, caught between an endangered homeland, the threat of deportation, the nightmare of detention, and the daily psychological pressure of belonging only by permission. In this proceeding, the surrogate is not concealment but evidence: a mask made transparent, an avatar entered into the record, and a protective fiction through which the Court indicts the danger that made the fiction necessary.

Across ten weekly witness interviews and a culminating tribunal performance, The People v. The King unfolds as a public investigation of testimony, evidence gathering, and symbolic prosecution, with online audiences seated as the Public Jury whose live chat, questions, and submissions enter the evidentiary record.

For additional information, witness bios, and series details visit the event page.

Find the full recorded proceedings for this docket in the Court Record.

The People v. The King | Docket 7: Matter of Necessary Resistance | Witness: Salma Orenda