If Future a Dead Loss, 2017
Werft 5 – Raum für Kunst, Cologne, Germany
installation, performance

Performance
2 hours approx.
Opening night. The waitresses stop serving drinks at a certain point of the night for no apparent reason. The visitors of the exhibition get involved in a particular frustrated transaction because of not being informed in advance.

Flip books
10 cm x 5 cm
Available for public to take away.
David Bowie, Muhammad Ali, Mark Fisher

«What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?»*
Conceived as a sculptural gesture, If Future a Dead Loss plays with the notion of a tribute to personal and collective expectations of western cultural production.

The central piece of this exhibition is 33,478 (2014-18), a sculpture comprised of a large wooden table that showcases books spines. The surface of the table alternates from glass blocks to wooden finish. I started by tearing pages of books, mostly encyclopedias, history books and dictionaries, only to keep the book spines, in order to question the manual labor behind the intellectual one. The work is using scenography, something between a staged funeral and a fashion defile, in order to unveil the void I face in contemporary cultural production.
At the opening night, 3 performers were taking orders and serving the audience but gradually failing purposefully to deliver. My ultimate goal was to infuse a feeling of temporary frustration in order to highlight the sentiment of reward over anticipation. Most of the audience left earlier due to bad service.
Lastly, the exhibition included 3 take away flipbooks with David Bowie, Muhammad Ali και Mark Fisher, who all died in the same year. The flipbooks bring the characters into motion through quick hand movements that bring back the gesture of manual labour.

*Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, John Hunt Publishing, 2009