In the areas of work, production, trade, behaviour, communication, commerce, the environment and the social system.

A common theme today is that the vision of the global village has failed. People need to reduce complexity because they cannot process the bombardment of news from all channels. They need to focus and select in order to manage their attention efficiently and escape burnout. But the total denial that is spreading has a toxic effect. A lack of curiosity and ignorance correlate strongly with abstinence from voting and dropping out of civilised discourse. "They promote conspiracy theories and leave the field to radicals of all colours. They allow the foundations of a democracy that guarantees freedom to quietly crumble".[1]

The issue that concerns us here - in the West and increasingly as humanity as a whole - is a dangerous combination of acceleration, quantity and complexity that not only challenges us humans, but is obviously increasingly overwhelming us. A neurologist recently equated the amount of information that we process in our brains every day today with the amount that a farmer had to deal with during his entire life a thousand years ago. However, the quantity alone would probably not be decisive, but combined with speed and complexity it is becoming an overwhelming factor. In many European countries, figures show that over 40% of the population are on the way to total media abstinence, the traditional explanatory, mediating and organising media. This is accompanied, among many other things, by a growing abstinence from democratic processes, coupled with an increasing acceptance of autocratic forms of government that promise to simplify - i.e. reduce the complexity of - life. 

How did it get this far? Let's take a look at two lines of development:

Since industrialisation, the modern age, i.e. for the last 250-300 years, we have been living in a permanent revolution. Mechanisation and electrification have together revolutionised not only production and distribution, transport, but also the forms and structures of work, and thus also our way of life. On 14 January 1914, Henry Ford introduced the assembly line. Together with his colleague Charles E. Sorensen, he transferred the idea of powered conveyor belts from the slaughterhouses, the so-called "disassembly lines", to the car factory. "Disassembly lines" became "assembly lines". [2] Step by step, and then ever faster and more powerful, this paved the way for the automation of labour and production processes. 

For 40 to 50 years, we have been on the turbo, the overdrive, the fast track to high technology, to digitalisation, to exponentially increasing billing services. At the moment, we all feel like we are sitting in a rocket that has just taken off. Destination unknown. Stopover in seven to ten years. Then the globe will be surrounded by 30,000 or more satellites, to give just one example. The universe is still a completely lawless space, as is the 100-kilometre-thick atmosphere around us. This will allow Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and a few others to dramatically speed up our communications once again as the night sky brightens. In the same period of time, AI and Tiktok (and subsequent media systems) will have taken over the training, work and entertainment of our brains. We will leave writing and arithmetic to the machines. Written communication will become obsolete, or shrink to 10 to 20 lines. Reading, thinking and remembering will weaken. Consumption will probably continue to increase, as will the number of consumers over the next 4-5 decades. The environment and nature will fight back ever more vehemently, but in vain, as it currently looks, and migration will inevitably increase accordingly. Even in the metaverse, bodies and their needs will not disappear. Unless the last flight to Mars envisioned by Musk becomes a reality. For whom, actually?

Secondly, let us remember the truth that once existed. Truth was carved in stone for a long time. The Ten Commandments of God, for example - in Judaism the centrepiece of the Torah and in Christianity the main source of Christian ethics. According to the Bible, Moses received them on Mount Sinai, twice even, because he smashed the first tablets out of anger and grief at the fact that people were dancing around the cult image of the golden calf. Truth was long a singular. There was only truth and error. The word of God (depending on the region of the world), full stop. It was only with the Gutenberg Bible, with the printing press, that biblical interpretations began, that the discussion about truth began, that it multiplied into the plural, into truths - into truths of faith and then, reduced or shifted, into factual certainties.

With the Enlightenment, modernity, the empowerment of people, the experience of the self and the other, the directions of orientation changed. No longer a vertical, God-centred orientation, but a horizontal, open, expansive one. The view out into the landscape became decisive, the conquest of the expanse, the surface, the world. Step by step, people began to occupy the earth, to define it physically and mentally, to mark it with their ideas, plans, paths and mighty buildings, with their growing knowledge. Nature transformed itself at great speed into a directed, vectorial landscape. For four centuries, we humans have been increasingly imprinting our truths and needs on the earth's surface. [3]

And today? Today, truths are becoming increasingly dispersed. Factual truths are still generally accepted, at least often. Meaning, on the other hand, is increasingly becoming something private. And, according to the current moral, only everyone can talk about and judge themselves. "Opinions and interpretations that once formed political truths will in future be immediately dismissed as ideologies. Truth is therefore no longer bound to meaning. It has melted down to the level of scientific facts." [4]

As long as the processes of inner and outer development and their spread take place slowly, embedded in the lifeworld, everything, everyone can always come to terms, reorganise and develop together. Excessive speed, on the other hand, combined with excessive quantity and complexity, challenge the systems and ultimately overtax us. Today, we are confronted with changes in many parameters, changes that are so enormous in size, speed and quality that we can no longer understand them, or at least no longer react to them adequately. Most of the time, we therefore feel dizzy, insecure, lost: Vertigo - in the range of uncertainty, blurriness, lack of clarity and dizziness - is becoming the new normal. As mentioned above, many of us react to the excessive demands by radically withdrawing, while others shout their (private) opinions on social media with great, imperious vigour. Both suffer from a narrowed field of vision. Recently, Anselm Kiefer, the famous German artist, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, one of the best-known curators, stood in front of a self-portrait by Rembrandt in the Louvre, whose contours and forms are blurring and dissolving. And Kiefer said: "That's how it is with everything in the world right now. Rising sea levels mean that the old boundaries no longer apply, everything has become boundless, blurred."[5]

The exhibition "Visual Vertigo - Scenarios of Rapid Change" brings together 29 video artists and 35 video works that deal with changes, developments and rapid change in many different ways: in forms of work, production, trade, behaviour, communication, consumption, in dealing with nature and with our social contract. 

Work and Manufacturing Processes

In terms of content, we start with the video by Chen Chieh-jen: Friend Watan, 2013: "System, management, serial number, dust, skin, corrosion, people no longer listed, law, governance, department, escape, suffocation, assessment, anxiety, virus, efficiency, standard depression": in the middle of the film, Watan speaks these terms quietly but with a clear voice. He has previously inspected a kind of "abandoned factory" that has been installed for the video. He has entered this factory and wandered through the remains of the past as if through a jungle. Watan Uma is a friend of the director. Chen Chieh-jen knows little about him, except that he left the factory, the factory work, in 1999 and ventured a new start with performances in 2004. In Friend Watan, we experience a melancholy, noisy visual journey through a bygone factory era.

Wang Bing's video 15 hours is a "one single-shot documentary filmed in a centralised garment processing facility in China, which consists of 18,000 production units and employs some 300,000 migrant workers."[6] In a single day, Wang Bing draws us step by step into a gigantic contemporary industrial landscape filmed in 2017, into a radical "meditation on the contemporary meaning of work and the state of labour conditions in present-day China."[7]

Ali Kazma's Tea Time (2017), on the other hand, focuses on the automation of work and the increase in speed in the production of glass. In 7 minutes and 17 seconds, the processes in this 3-channel video merge into a permanent, rhythmically structured flow. Kazma seduces us here with the "cadence of automatic production lines".[8] The video was recorded in the Paşabahçe glass factory, where one million pieces, including 300,000 tea glasses, are produced every day.

In Anna Witt's video Unbox the future from 2019, workers at the Toyota factory in the Japanese city of Toyota discuss the impact of automation and AI on the transformation of work, including the possibility of its loss, and more holistically, the merging of city and factory, of private life and working life. The discussion about the meaning and future of work is visually accompanied by pantomime movements that feed labour movements before and after the automation steps into an individual and collective choreography. Over time, the workers also take steps towards a possible liberation from labour by playing music in the factory or cutting each other's factory overalls open and away.

In his four videos - After Hours (2013), Calvin and Holiday (2014), Lazy Nigel (2015), Without Light (2106) - Simon Gush discusses the conditions of work and production, the visibility of work and invisibility, the demonstration that one is working intensively, that one is overworked, and - particularly in the video Calvin and Holiday - he discusses the work ethic, which, with Calvinism, almost became a religion. We are here, we exist, in order to work, is what this means in a nutshell. All four videos are in black and white and are filmed remarkably slowly. Simon Gush wanders past workplaces and reflects on the labour system. Only in After Hours does he manage without text; here he slowly pans through an office, a series of offices that become silent and empty after work, and films the scenery like an archeological site of the present. 

Trade & Traffic

Sky Sherwin wrote in the Guardian about Cao Fei's wonderful video Asian One: "The Chinese artist delivers a surreal sci-fi romance that tells of China's past and the global future. In her 2018 film Asia One, she reinvents Chaplin's Modern Times for the era of Amazon warehouses. Instead of machine gears and assembly lines, nothing is actually manufactured in her brave new world. Products arrive in boxes emblazoned with the logos of international brands, transported via conveyor belts or stacked on metal shelves. This soulless centre is actually a composition filmed at various locations, including the world's first fully automated sorting centre in the Chinese province of Jiangsu. The two human inhabitants of the warehouse, a young man and a young woman, have humdrum jobs - one scans, the other sits at a desk. Whether they are sitting next to each other or watching each other through technology, they are naturally strangers." [9] 
But then the film changes pace and dancers appear. Slowly, the duo rebels and disrupts the room with seemingly irrational but human behaviour.
Today, global trade and global traffic mean the networking and spanning of the earth's crust with a dense network of movements and actions, of analogue and digital transports, so intensively that the earth's crust shakes, the air shimmers, the seas ripple and the birds can no longer find their direction, the fish can no longer find their way home, until migration, the transport of goods, people and plants becomes the norm. An explosive mixture of the relocation of production sites, a late capitalist deliver-explosion: "deliver-deliver-deliver" in the shortest possible time! In addition to Cao Fei, Kaya & Blank and Stefan Panhans/Andrea Winkler thematise Trade & Traffic. Kaya & Blank in their almost eerily calm video Intermodal (2023), filmed in the neighbouring cargo ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Like in a ballet, the containers are lifted, moved, lowered, unlatched and thus given their new direction, their final destination. The procedure of loading, unloading and moving seems to be so precisely coordinated that the movements of the containers have an almost meditative, calming effect. "Everything has its order and takes its proper course," reads the invisible mantra in "Intermodal". The video, placed at the beginning of the exhibition, acts like the visual baseline of a song, like the heartbeat of the exhibition. In complete contrast to the hectic pace, the fighting gesture in Anima Overdrive by Stefan Panhans/Andrea Winkler, the shrill rap solo of Platform Capitalism, the final delivery of the goods by a bicycle courier, the deliver-deliver-deliver scream. Michel Rebosura writes: "We look down from above at a small-looking woman with hard facial expressions, who stands in front of an oversized rucksack and begins to rap. (...) The typical gestures are repeatedly reduced to childlike and robotic movements. The broad shoulders of the American football armour hint at the hardships that a bicycle courier has to endure during rush hour. It seems as if the figure is addressing us clients directly from the smartphone."[10] Rebosura concludes that the duo is formulating a critique of the gig and delivery economy and platform capitalism, in which we ourselves become products as data suppliers. 

 

New Behaviour

The artists Nina Fischer/ Maroan el Sani write: "With The Rise, we wanted to realise a film that shows the uncanny, the unforeseen, which lurks directly under the glossy surface of the modern environment. Moments in which the fragility of the layer of civilisation is noticeable. (...) With this project we wanted to focus on the complex relationship between the visual language of a building, its psychological effects and the political-economic reality in which it functions." They filmed in Zuidas, a new city in the south of Amsterdam, which is due to be completed by 2030. The shiny surface of the new architecture was animated by a young manager who breathlessly wants to climb higher and higher, who seems to be restlessly and completely sacrificing his life for the promised ascent. Only to find out in the end that someone is already "at the top". 

In her video performance (2017-2018), Gabriela Löffel deals with a kind of experimental set-up. We follow the performance rehearsals of a young speaker who is coached by an expert. She tries to optimise his performance so that his speech comes across as convincing, winning, perhaps even "victorious". This exercise in presentation skills is based on the introductory speech of a CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of an American homeland security company. The speaker evokes the growth opportunities of his industry in the face of the increasing need for secure fencing, video surveillance and other forms of defence at national borders."[11] To ensure that the performance attempts come across as genuine as possible, Löffel films a test set-up in which the speaker actually practises in real life. Sigrid Adorf concludes that it is a play "that operates with the 'as if' mode and creates a blurring of the staging between authenticity and fiction through several interventions and shifts". A play with the "elements of the real in the sense of an experimental arrangement".[12]

A doctor recommends to the character in Sven Johnes film: Take the long way home (2016) when he feels tense, overworked, overwhelmed, if he has hardly slept for a week. He is told to sing a lullaby and then sleep like a baby. For 10 minutes, we follow a painful dichotomy: how the driver is bombarded by World News (Legends of World Press Photographs 2001-2015) and simultaneously fights against the endless flow of information and against falling asleep by singing. Confusion, bewilderment, drowning in the complexity and abundance of information becomes manifest in the night-time car journey.

Pilvi Takala's The Stroker (2018) is a two-channel video installation based on Takala's two week-long intervention at 'Second Home', a trendy East London coworking space for young entrepreneurs and startups. During the intervention Takala posed as a wellness consultant named Nina Nieminen, the founder of cutting-edge company Personnel Touch who were allegedly employed by Second Home to provide touching services in the workplace. Nina strolled around Second Home being friendly to everyone, greeting and lightly touching people as she passed them by. It gets the office talking, workers gossip amongst themselves, visibly bonding over a common confusion - she was nicknamed 'The Stroker'."[13]

The reactions of the employees were very different, some hardly reacted at all, others smiled and found the touch pleasant, while others reacted sensitively, unpleasantly touched, attacked from the outside in their physical space. Invisible thresholds and boundaries are thus made visible that would otherwise remain hidden and only manifest themselves in moods.

Pauline Oltheten's video "Kapitalism" reads like the antithesis to the Hassle, to the frenzied system in which we are all stuck. The bench with the splayed inscription "Kapitalism" becomes a handhold for those who have been discarded, spat out, for people who have lost their job, their work, their sense of purpose, perhaps because they have lost their job or their age, and are now gently setting their frail, ageing bodies in motion, slowly exercising. And for us, the bench becomes a telescope, a view that reminds us, that reminds us what this is all about, that seems so important, so central and inevitable to us every second.

 

Communication

Pilvi Takala's Stroker also fits in well with the theme of communication. The desire for touch, the idea of promoting and guiding employees with touch, is directly related to our compartmentalisation, our new digital communications and friendships.

The heroine in "If you didn't choose A, you will probably choose B" by Ariane Loze, an active woman in her mid-thirties in a suit, is repeatedly analysed - spied on and tracked down by "living" algorithms, personified "zeros" and "ones" in black and white T-shirts, whose artificial intelligence serves commercial purposes. All the protagonists, embodied by the artist herself, wander through the streets of a deserted Paris that looks like science fiction.
"The work reveals," writes Anne Dressen, "how our data is exchanged and resold without our knowledge (through matching), depending on geolocalisation and preferences of data traders (Facebook, Google, Tinder and other dating apps, as well as Deliveroo, Spotify, YouTube or Amazon)."[14]
Profitability (2017), the second video by Ariane Loze, is a satire on the world of work. It proposes a comparison between the artistic work and the commercial product, blurring the differences between the respective logics of production, distribution and communication."[15]
We wrongly believe that posts on social media with aggressive, horrible texts and violent or pornographic images are deleted by machine filters and AI. Most of it is viewed, read and judged by poorly paid people. In the anonymous tower block in Manila that we see right at the beginning of the video Praying for my haters (2019) by Lauren Huret, hundreds, thousands of content managers, contractually condemned to silence, are engaged in this highly agonising activity. An off-screen voice evokes the horror of this form of communication and its consequences as quietly as insistently, criticising the curse of images that befalls us in this way as "the hidden side of our horrors and errors". Over time, the skyscraper is permeated by large crowds of people taking part in a Christian ceremony and celebration. Manila has remained Christian since the Portuguese. This is probably the reason for the attitude reflected in the title, which is rarely found in other religions: Praying for my haters. It is as radical as Matthew 5:39: "But I say to you, do not resist evil, but resist it: If anyone strikes you on your right cheek, offer him the other also." [16]
Stefan Panhan's 7-10 Million (2005) deals on the one hand with the agony of choice in a society permeated by consumerism and dyed in the wool, and on the other with the communication associated with it. The head of the buyer in the video is full of information and advertising texts, and he tries - frantically, desperately - to distinguish the wrong from the right, the trivial from the important information in the run-up to a possible purchase - until he almost seems to take off.
Neighbour Abdi (2022) is the name of the film that Douwe Dijkstra made together with his neighbour Abdiwahab Ali. "How can you understand a violent past?", writes Dijkstra, "Somali-born Abdi is furniture designer and support worker. He reenacts his life, marked by war and criminality, with the help of his neighbour and filmmaker Douwe. By means of playful reconstructions in a special effects studio, Abdi and Douwe embark on a candid and investigative journey through a painful history, focusing on the creative process throughout." As a theatrical, staged documentary, the film shows that with open and honest communication, it is even possible to overcome a seemingly hopeless situation. But presumably only ever through direct, sympathetic communication. 

For The Bots (2020), Eva and Franco Mattes collaborated with investigative journalist Adrian Chen and actors Irina Cocimarov, Jesse Hoffman, Jake Levy, Alexandra Marzella, Ruby McCollister and Bobbi Salvör Menuez. They present anonymous testimonies from content moderators who worked for Facebook in Berlin. 

In their work The Bots, Eva & Franco Mattes explicitly point out that critical content is viewed and edited in large quantities by individuals. In the case of crowdsourced labour brokers, content moderators often do not know which companies they work for. They are employed by so-called contractors who mediate between tech giants such as Google, Meta, YouTube and Twitter and the employees. This preserves the anonymity of the companies, minimises their legal responsibility and protects them thanks to a confidentiality agreement. Eva & Franco Mattes create a deliberately stark contrast to the content with their chosen aesthetic. They use the staging of make-up tutorials for their artistic work. Political content is camouflaged in order to avoid censorship.[17]

Communication is the key issue of today and tomorrow. We must fight not to lose control, but to regain it. To do this, we need to be able to scrutinise the sources, the method and the distribution channel. For both text and image communication.

Natural Environment
In 1972, the UN Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm. "This was the first time that attention was drawn to the fact that the natural foundations of life must be preserved in order to achieve a lasting improvement in the living conditions of all and that cross-border co-operation is necessary to achieve this. The focus was placed on solving environmental problems without, however, forgetting the social, economic and development policy aspects. In the same year, the Club of Rome published the report "Limits to Growth", which attracted enormous attention in the context of the Stockholm Conference and the oil crisis of the early 1970s.[18] That was more than fifty years ago. Everything that was mentioned at the time, especially in the Club of Rome report, came far sooner than expected. The climate is driving us fast and furiously, while we are fuelling the climate with coal, oil and gas. A dangerous dilemma.
Ten years after the nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, the video work Contaminated Home (2021) by Nina Fischer/Maroan el Sani is a reminder of its consequences. The film consists of photographs of a Japanese family who were forced to leave their home 23 km from the damaged nuclear power plant after the nuclear disaster on 11 March 2011. After self-evacuating to Kyoto, the family regularly returns to their home with a camera and a Geiger counter to document the transformation of the site and measure the radiation. Fischer el Sani have documented the visits to the family's contaminated home in ongoing conversations. The photographs of the house, collected over the years and edited into a film, become a disturbing cinematic family album of a life at a standstill due to its manifest uninhabitability.[19]

As a multimedia video, sound and space installation, Dominique Koch's Sowing the Seeds for the Future (2020) "weaves three narratives into a 'science-fictional poetry'. The film shows images from the research institute ICARDA (International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas), whose research programme and data collection in Aleppo, Syria, was threatened with destruction due to the ongoing war. They are interwoven with a conversation with the natural philosopher Andreas Weber, who deals with the idea of unconditional reciprocity and paraphrases this with the concept of "edibility". In addition, another fictional voice conveys the perspective of the stored seeds." [20] 
ICARDA has one of the world's largest collections of old and wild seed varieties, which it continuously plants and archives. ICARDA's research goal is to prevent hunger crises resulting from droughts and other disasters. On the one hand, Dominique Koch's video deals specifically with facts, current situations and past scenarios. On the other hand, there are trains of thought that deal with the future of the planet, with the relationship of us humans to our own nature, scientifically, politically, philosophically, poetically. The rhythm is set by the sorting out of seeds.

Lucy Beech conducts rigorous research and creates speculative fiction. According to her thinking and nature, this could also be reversed into speculative research and rigorous fiction. Not for the sheer fun of it, for the sheer pleasure of it, but for the desire to be fully immersed and completely open. On the way to more and new knowledge, to more and greater intensity. The path to heaven leads through waste, the path to the spirit through bodily fluids. In the film "Flush" shown here, Beech portrays an intersexual cow that gives no milk, is infertile and therefore agriculturally useless. Instead, she becomes a richly associative starting point for reflecting on biological gender differentiation and transformation as well as the corresponding endocrinological research results in a film essay, sound essay and language essay. Lucy Beech creates haunting, pleasurable poetic-scientific film art that is highly stimulating. 

"The world's most water-rich region is experiencing the worst drought since records began. Ecologists warn that the Amazon could dry up - and then itself become a threat to the global climate." The news item in the Tagesschau programme on German TV's First Channel on 8 November this year is the painfully accurate introduction to Broken Spectre by Richard Mosse (camera: Trevor Tweeten, sound: Ben Frost). After the radicalised deforestation of the rainforest (and democracy) under Bolsonaro, now the attack of disturbed nature itself. "Bolsonaro came to power in 2018 and promoted deforestation on a grand scale. When the dry season started in 2019, there was a huge amount of slash-and-burn - and we decided that maybe this could be our next project, and we decided to go to Brazil," says Mosse, who has been working in the rainforests of Latin America on and off for a few years.

On one side we see shots of the destruction of the forest from a bird's eye view, on the other - in black and white widescreen format - we see people felling trees, riding horses and working in a slaughterhouse, and we visit the villages of the Yanomami. The third screen shows deep close-ups of the forest floor, shot in brilliant, multispectral colours - it's almost like looking at cells through a microscope. 

You can not only see Broken Spectre, you can also feel it. The sound of the Australian Ben Frost, who lives in Iceland, travels along the ground and enters our bodies. Frost has strapped a sound recorder to trees that are being felled and used ultrasonic microphones to capture the sound of insects that sound like chainsaws. "The brain is stretched to breaking point to process the images on the 20-metre-long screen."

Social Contract
In her videos, Julika Rudelius often examines human behaviour and the social power structures hidden within it. Mostly indoors, however. The exhibited video work The only reason ... (2019), on the other hand, was created in an outdoor space in the eastern centre of Los Angeles, the Skid Row area, and shows outdoor spaces and streets. The work was created during a residency in Los Angeles, when Rudelius lived next door to a drug dealer and near a methadone clinic. She quickly realised that the only visible people in her surroundings were either homeless people living in tents on the pavements or drug addicts on a trip. Built architecture, unaffordable for many, with tent cities along the walls and limousines in front of them, an expensive fleet of cars gliding through the streets. Or underground car park, guarded car park, tent city and street. The camera glides calmly but almost without stopping through the streets, always looking to the right, from the street to the pavement, single view, double view, triple view, and shifts in split-screen technique, rhythmisations of the journey, of the view. Society is radically divided into two, no protection for the dispossessed. Neoliberalism has torn people far apart.
Melanie Gilligan released the film "The Common Sense" in 2014. It is conceived in the style of a mini-series, with 15 episodes. Gilligan uses drama and fiction to explore social, political and economic issues. She examines the dangers of the common and the collective. To do this, she created a fictional technology with the simple name "Patch", which makes it possible to directly sense the emotions of other people. Like a pastille, it is placed in the roof of the mouth and enables an emphatic connection to other people, allowing them to perceive and empathise with their feelings. In Gilligan's vision of the future, this fictional technology, the principles of which are reminiscent of the emotional economy of existing social networks, has already existed for ten years. During this time, the relationship between the individual and the collective has changed significantly. In the capitalist world, the invention is used to control workers in a profound way. For example, a manager uses the transfer of negative energies to employees in order to increase their productivity. The film poses various questions to the viewer: What would the world look like if individual needs did not exist? What would happen in our world, in which people are primarily connected by capital, if we could share emotions directly? The word common in the film title could be understood in two ways: the community of human society on the one hand, and the totality of capital on the other. [21]

The social contract was broken several times in the second half of the 20th century. A central reason for this is "devaluation". The book "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet" by Raj Patel (economist) and Jason W. Moore (historian) devotes seven chapters to one aspect of this devaluation of the world: nature is devalued just as much as money, labour, care, food, energy and life. With the sole aim of maximising the profits of the few. The authors describe as impressively and comprehensively that the crises of our time are in reality a single major crisis and that this has a long history. "Today, when cheap labour processes cheap chlorinated chicken into cheap chicken wings, this is," as they exemplify, "a destructive economic principle that has evolved over centuries."[22]

Throw-in:

Smaller screens appear seven times throughout the exhibition. They show videos that can be read as commentaries, as commentaries on world events, the state of the world, the state of the world, but at the same time they are also interjections into the exhibition itself. Four of them are by Simon Dybbroe Møller, from his project What Do People Do All Day, (2020-22). He explains his project as follows: "Simon Dybbroe Møller's adaptation of Richard Scarry's iconic 1968 children's book What Do People Do All Day replaces the original's drawings of cute anthropomorphised animals doing people-things in industrious and purposeful Busytown with real life neurotic humans operating in the skizophrenic landscape of post-capitalism. Here app-based gig economy occupations rub shoulders with vocations that seem weirdly anachronistic. We are reminded of how much remains unchanged, how we still fix the sewers, serve meals, cut down trees and drive trucks. We are taken on a journey from the idealistic "everybody is a worker" of Busytown todays techno capitalist "everything is work"." [23]

DIS, an American collective, created Circle time, a programme that attempts the most difficult thing of all, namely to explain the characteristics and problems of the world to children. In the video "Money with Babak Radboy", Babak Radboy explains the role of money, labour and capitalism to young children. "You've got to spend money to make money - and nothing is better at making money than money itself. Paid for our time and spending our time to get paid, wage labour is a self-perpetuating exploitative machine, turning our bodies into profit machines that fuel the accumulation and consolidation of wealth for the very few of the managerial class. (...) Explaining the ruthlessness of capital to children, Babak Radboy peels away the skin of our society to reveal the skeleton of money propping it up and proposes a brave new world where money breathes along with us."[24]

DIS also created the PSA programme, Public Service Announcement, which aims to do nothing other than provide information quickly and accurately: "In this era of mass confusion and delusion it's important to keep the facts straight. Beginning with the mass deception that led to the financial crisis, these PSAs offer clarity in an increasingly opaque world. Nr. 1 is " A Good Crises": After the global housing collapse there was the rare opportunity to revolutionize or at the very least regulate the economic world order that had just wiped out 50 years of middle class wealth gains. But now that Wall Street has taken away the one form of wealth middle class Americans had, their homes, they want to become your landlord. No more safety net, there is now a network of temporary homes, forcing renters into a state of perpetual social insecurity." With the sharp conclusion: "You wanted an economic revolution? We're in one - just not the one you wanted."[25]

The Biennal of Sydney presented Will Benedict's All Bleeding Stops Eventually (2019) with these words: "In All Bleeding Stops Eventually (2019), the artist presents us with six scenarios, in which near-extinct animals, the sun and the moon are given the power of human speech, addressing us directly to talk about the relationship that we humans have with nature. A polar bear talks about the melting ice caps, while a puffa fish tells us that oceans themselves have opinions. Across each of these scenes, we are implored to understand ourselves as a part of, not as separate to nature. We learn that many of the solutions we have invented to rescue the planet from ecological degradation are still in service of a future that centres humans and their continued domination over the natural world."

This concludes the text and the exhibition.

 

 

 

 

 
[1] With thoughts from Beat Balzli, Editor-in-Chief, Editorial, NZZ am Sonntag, 12 November
[2] 14 January 1914 - Henry Ford introduces the assembly line " AutoNatives.de (12 November 2023)
[3] Today we are, as Paul Virilio put it in the 1990s, "on the threshold of a new "city of light" under the sign of electro-optics and electro-acoustics, which will replace the old "city of matter", which in turn had displaced the villages and rural settlements. The VIRTUAL CITY, the last of the cities, is thus no longer a precisely situable urban entity, but a META CITY.... ." 
[4] Jan Söffner is Professor of Cultural Theory and Cultural Analysis at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen. In NZZ - https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/wahrheit-in-einer-welt-der-fakten-ist-sie-nicht-mehr-wichtig-ld.1679292
[5] Quoted from: Hans Ulrich Obrist: How do new masters view old masters? Column in Das Magazin, , No. 50, 16 December 2023, page 31
[6] https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/15-hours-wang-bing/OAEXOCrRMuR7kA
[7] https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/15-hours-wang-bing/OAEXOCrRMuR7kA
[8] Ali KAZMA - Analix Forever
[9] Skye Sherwin Fri 31 Jul 2020 11.00 CEST Cao Fei's Asia One: human behaviour | Art and design | The Guardian
[10] Michel Rebosura in: https://2023.jurierungen.aargauerkuratorium.ch/project/andrea-winkler-stefan-panhans/
[11] https://loeffelgabriela.com/performance/
[12] Sigrid Adorf: "Elements of the real in the sense of an experimental arrangement" - thoughts on a

artistic-cultural-analytical understanding of experimentation. Quoted from file:///C:/Users/ursst/Downloads/Elemente_des_Wirklichen_im_Sinne_einer_V.pdf
[13] Quoted from Pilvi Takala - The Stroker
[14] Anne Dressen, quoted from https://www.arianeloze.com/If-you-didn-t-choose-A-you-will-probably-choose-B-1
[15] Florian Gaité, quoted from https://www.arianeloze.com/Profitability
[16] Quoted from Matthew 5:39 | Luther Bible 2017 :: ERF Bibleserver
[17] Description with the help of the exhibition description of the Frankfurter Kunstverein, where Eva and Franco Mattes showed an exhibition in summer 2023. Quoted from: The Bots, 2020 | Frankfurter Kunstverein (fkv.de)
[18] 1972: UN Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm (admin.ch)
[19] Contaminated Home | Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani (fischerelsani.net)
[20] Thea Reifler and Phila Bergmann, quoted from: Sowing the Seeds for the Future - Dominique Koch
[21] Quoted from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanie_Gilligan#The_Common_Sense and from https://www.fkv.de/koerper-ich-melanie-gilligan/
[22] https://www.amazon.de/Entwertung-Geschichte-sieben-billigen-Dingen-ebook/dp/B07CV42Q9P/ref=sr_1_2?__mk_de_DE=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&crid=208O64N2LSCNN&keywords=Raj+Patel+Jason+W.+Moore&qid=1703869440&sprefix=raj+patel+jason+w.+moore+%2Caps%2C74&sr=8-2
[23] Simon Dybrroe Möller, Intro, offered by the artist.
[24] https://dis.art/series/circle-time
[25] https://dis.art/series/public-service-announcement