Second Wave
July 2020
Premier: Kunsthalle 3,14 Bergen, 20 August 2020
A new – contracted and s(p)ite-specific – edit of One Nation Under A Grave (2020), for as pop up art show in Bergen mid-pandemic.Second Chapter at Kunsthalle 3,14 in Bergen.
This version notes the structural identity of the logic of Brexit and the logic of the pandemic under the reign of homicidal laissez-faire (make work and let die) capitalism.
Both Brexit and the Tory management of covid 19 are mechanisms decreeing expanded social murder for increased short term profits (and longer term collapse). Both, as mythologies and mechanisms for a right shift, stage a Reichstag fire for the age of social media and social distance. They are ‘freedom games’ in which the rich get richer and the poor die at an accelerated rate, all in the name of your freedom to (insert class specific fate: work/shop/etc).
This mechanism is built into the form and 'address to viewer' of the video, which was shown in a Bergen gallery at a time when it was questionable that any public space should be open, and during which, as film-makers / artists, we found ourselves needing to pressure the institution to make the viewing experience safer, in the end only their laid back promotion of their own pop-up protected the potential public from their idea of a ‘socially distanced’ (ie side by side) seating arrangement. This anticipated similar wrangles in Cyprus & UK art spaces (see later videos).
As a social relation (necessarily incorporating ‘institutional critique’ or ‘anti-relational aesthetics’?) this edit of One Nation Under A Grave testifies to the universality of the homicidal drive of late neoliberal /para-fascist regimes that impose work and sustain middle class cultural consumption without paying for the mass suspension of labour necessary to actually end a pandemic. We hadn't been pro-Corbyn for so very long before the election; in turn, the pandemic would make us nostalgic for Fidel Castro. But ofc the answer is neither Washington nor Havana nor even Beijing capitalism (etc) but global communism.
This version notes the structural identity of the logic of Brexit and the logic of the pandemic under the reign of homicidal laissez-faire (make work and let die) capitalism. Both Brexit and the Tory management of covid 19 are mechanisms for expanded social murder and increased short term profits. Both, as mythologies and digital mechanisms for a ‘right shift’, stage a Reichstag fire for the age of social media and social distance. They are 'games of freedom' in which the rich get richer and the poor die at an accelerated rate, all in the name of your freedom to (insert class specific fate: work/shop/etc).