Let's Talk About Tomorrow

What do we have in common? With each other, with our past selves, but most importantly, what will connect us with future generations? In this day and age full of political turmoil and ecological uncertainty, is it worth brooding over what it means to rely-on and to lend a hand to some body? Formalized by Timothy Morton and Donna Haraway, the concept of symbiosis in itself defines no entity as self-standing, we are all complementary to an other being. Though it is unclear which is the top symbiont, and which is the parasite, humans and the microbiomes inhabit the same space, and have to learn to share. This co-dependent reliance, found all around us, and deeply rooted in our own species’ evolution, is defined as solidarity. “The word describes a state of physical and political organization, and it describes a feeling.” (Morton, 2017)

Let’s Talk About Tomorrow brings together works by contemporary artists Beatriz Creel, Liselotte Klint, Sara Rodrigues and Panicattack Duo collective. Hosted at No Format gallery in South East London, the show unravels in a visual installation of Beatriz’s The Land That Does Not Yet Exist, with her The New Humanity video (2017) as a dystopian manifesto addressed to the ‘new humanity’. Land that does not yet exist is a sculpture of steel representing an abstract form of a land that could exist in the future. This land is a place where everything is ideal, where the ‘new humanity’ has found plenitude.

This intention is complemented by Sara Rodrigues’ first chapters of the documentary Deptford Lives: every day is a good day. Incited by her co-producer John Price, owner of El Cheap ‘Ou, Sara embarked on a discovery of Deptford’s lasting residents and shop owners, an array of individuality which comments on contemporary community-making, and our ability to bond, beyond our kin, beyond appearance, commonality, age-gap and background. What does it mean to have social governance? How can our relations on the individual level impact the local and the global?

Liselotte Klint’s Square Studies performance (2018) maps out a micro-cosmos of interrelations and internal collisions. The performers are given a set of parameters: a physical space, time, psycho-social behavioural parameters and a reflexive disruptive element. Armed, they interact with each other and themselves, evolving into abstracted metaphors, zooming into personal dialogues, and zooming out into a mini-society of molecules, behaving as a dysfunctional hive.

Panic bugs, Panicattack Duo’s new performance (2018) takes the form of a contemporary reimagining of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The artists rely-on each other, and through each other they uncover an array of millennial angsts and artistic anxieties. You are taken on a sonic journey of self-enquiry, with echoes of aimlessness, time currency and ethical agency. “Solidarity restarts temporality. Solidarity means being freed from one’s being caught in the past and to have entered a vibrant nowness in which the future opens.” (Morton, 2017)

The exhibition continues to 1 July, and you are invited to explore the inhabiting installations of Beatriz Creel’s manifestos to humanity, and Sara Rodrigues’ score of How Or How Not To Become A We, and various sound recordings of the performative attempts. The latter was born out of a collective residency, and explores how to understand and be understood when caught up between oral language, known vocabulary, culture, taste, genetic predisposition, context, willingness, personality traits, and interests.

Facebook event: RSVP here: https://www.facebook.com/events/230547854204224/ 

curated by Oana Damir