Inspired by the watery metaphors and expressions used to describe and naturalise the movement of currency - literally “the condition of flowing”. Starting at our body’s relation to water it undulates outwards and the water becomes just as much an idea as substance.
Terms like ‘trickle down’ or ‘bubble up’ are exceptional metaphors as they not only borrow water’s characteristics but also directly appropriate them. In a similar vein I ask myself if (or when) the flows of capital take over water’s place in the dominant cultural imaginary as an unquestionable and irrefutable source of life.
The water in this piece has left the biosphere and is instead circulating wealth cloaked in a watery guise. The animations mix illustration styles popularised by Big Tech with classic motifs from art history. Narcissus and ‘Le Penseur’ are drenched in ‘Corporate Memphis’, their bendy limbs washed clean by the ancient artesian aquifier of FIJI Water.
An elliptical mash-up fiction set in a dystopian future. Ominous graphs of rising temperatures and water levels are communicated in colourful laser animations next to amateur paintings of sail boats. Inspired by Marcel Broodthaer’s film and book ‘A Voyage on the North Sea (1973) as well as Rosalind Krauss’ eponymous lecture about Broodthaer’s piece in which she describes art in the age of the post-medium condition this piece dives into the instrumentalisation and capitalisation of the image as well as an aestheticization of catastrophe information.
This future is experienced aesthetically and all messages are converted to capital. All is form and nothing is substance. The journey into an uncertain future is communicated as one of matter of factly progress and triumph where humankind has innovated and expanded their way out of crisis.
