Group exhibition
Salonul de proiecte, Bucharest, RO
Mobility is ubiquitous, and even more, it is imperative. People and things move faster and further – emblems of a liquid contemporaneity. Information circulates at the speed of light, while the capitalist project abstracts and encrypts everything around us to produce quantifiable data. On the other hand, politics and social networks keep us captive in a cloud of affects meant to color our lives, and the continuous experience of these intensities makes the messages that reach us effective, seductive and overwhelming. We live in such confusion that apophenia – the need to search for meanings in disparate things and realities – becomes the preferred modality and tool for deciphering an unstable world.
We operate in a perpetual crisis, carried by torrents, always trying to give solidity to the ground beneath us. We have become accustomed to being dragged around and exhausted by the decisions we make minute by minute. Global problems are instantiated locally, but the violence that occurs elsewhere has become unspectacular, although it traumatizes people and places. The lack of understanding of what constitutes cause and effect gives rise to wild prophecies about the post-apocalyptic world. The prophecies construct scenarios convincing enough so that entire communities contemplate the end or the breaking point, and the fear of this outcome amplifies toxic reflexes and actually precipitates the collapse, all in the name of the need to avoid it.
Alienated Complicities started from the need to examine our own positions and to identify our vulnerabilities and incongruities in relation to the environment in which we live. In order to arrive at a representation of the present – which could just as well be seen as a past repeating itself – we started from the premise that we need to talk about injustices and inconsistencies, exploring major and minor traumas that would otherwise be swept under the rug, as if they had never happened.
By addressing global issues that seem to have no solution – such as the socialist project, the Palestinian struggle, freedom of movement – the exhibition brings together a series of contributions that are deeply rooted in the contexts from which they come. They are articulated through individual and collective methodologies, and what results are various adaptation tools, speculative frameworks, political or utopian actions, or simply fictions, locally produced, albeit in a dynamic locality “in transit”. What unites them is the reflection on the dulled sense of orientation in a composite reality. The works in the exhibition therefore invoke dreams, narratives, interviews, efforts and scaffolding; they seem to navigate according to computational schemes that describe the relationship between human movement and the environment.
Text by Alice Gancevici & Remus Pușcariu
Collaboration:
Curators: Alice Gancevici & Remus Pușcariu