The spiral either gets bigger or smaller – depends on which end you focus.
What they both have in common though, is the fact that at some point you can no longer detect it with the naked eye. Being too small or too big, it simply disappears.
Living in the era of what Ewa Jasiewicz calls as “time poverty”, the work is intensified, worse paid, and more casualised and our lives can therefore quickly become an anxious routine.
We start living through verbs and the only proof of our existence are the notes we make our agendas.
Living one day at a time becomes surviving one day at a time.
Inspired by the New Yorker comics, I wrote a short story that would be based on a reader, work either as a realistic report or an unrelatable dystopia. Pointing out the absurdity of such a concept being so widely accepted Arnar and I built a 1:1 scenography, visualising the ideas from the story.
It’s a 2,5 x 2,5 m big frame over which there’s stretched a piece of fabric, sewn from yoga pants.
The decision for the yoga pants came from their history of being invented as a consumer product for Western market appropriating yoga by minimizing it into a trendy exercise routine, relieving the daily stress caused by the same – Western – culture.
In the middle of the fabric canvas, there’s a cut that only appears when the fabric is stretched by a handle turned by a visitor. With a pulley system in the back of the structure, the fabric opens in the middle, giving you the idea of having the power to change things, yet you can only turn it so far before the handle rotates back into its original position and the hole in the fabric closes again.
The system does not care about you
it goes its own way
whilst you feed on delusions
of having complete control over your life
which you live
through verbs
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, instead of the 1:1 scenography that was supposed to be exhibited in the Stedelijk Museum, there was a virtual exhibition with a video presentation of the project made by Arnar Freyr Sigurðsson.
Big thanks to:
Cristiano Milanese
Pauline Lavocat
Ana Štuhec
Gašpar Marinič
Klara Debeljak
Salma Lazaro
Kees Koolhaas
Egon Peršak
Alja Rojko
Boris Kokol
Aljaž Hvala
for lending their voices
and
Parasite 2.0 for their mentorship