Norsk Kulturråd, June-July 2016
Bergen, Hordaland, Norway
An investigation into Bergen’s industrial history and post-capitalist futures, The knees are part of a collaborative exhibition featuring the work of a dozen of visual artists, theorists, geographers, historians and practitioners. Seven drawings fill seven windows. Each is identical in dimensions. Each is a different study of the many structural hand-carved timber knees of the long reperbanen (or building for making rope) on Sanviksveien. Oscillating between man-made and machinist aesthetics, these digital compositions suggest an architecture of repetition that ties to notions of pre-industrial nostalgia, mass production and automated design.
Grounded in a theory of ‘accelerationism’—the idea that the logic of late capitalism should not be reversed but rapidly carried forward to a point of inevitable collapse—the exhibition was built against the backdrop of a crisis of our traditional concept of work, or waged labour. With mass unemployment and underemployment, and increasing surplus populations worldwide, accelerationists are demanding full automation of work and a universal basic income.
The Memento Mori project responds to this political impetus with a study in representation that ranges from fictional to abstract to deeply embodied, in order to address a series of pressing questions: what is the relationship between work and human nature? How do we relate to the ruins of industry in our cities?