M&Y&EWM – Chapter 3: Culture and art in the cognitive workspace

A video cycle curated by BAR project
October 2014-January 2015. Zumzeig cinema, Barcelona

Me and You and Everyone We Meet is a video program (films, shorts, feature films, and documentaries) structured in four chapters that explores the places of subjective production and the work environment, taking it as a space on which it is necessary to reflect in order to generate readings and possibilities that imagine new ways of living and organizing ourselves.

Wednesday, December 3, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Zumzeig Cinema
Chapter 3: Culture and art in the cognitive workspace

Julien Prévieux, Anomalies Construites, 2011, 07’41”; Agnieszka Polska, How the Work is Done, 2011, 6´24´´; Anna Moreno, Select the right location, 2014, 33’; Chto Delat?, Museum Songspiel: The Netherlands 20XX, 2011, 25’21’’

With an introduction by the artist Anna Moreno, this chapter focuses on the place that culture and art occupy, or can occupy, in the current labor paradigm in which the cognitive is the protagonist. The four films deal, from different perspectives, with issues such as creative work in the business environment, the role of the artist in society, culture in the face of crisis or the possibilities of the museum in an apocalyptic future.

DESCRIPTION OF THE FILMS

Julien Prévieux, Anomalies construites, 2011, 7’41”
A slow “travelling” on the screens of a computer room. In a voice-over, two users of Google’s free modeling software “Sketchup” – which allows the creation of 3D monuments in Google Earth – testify: one from a passionate approach and satisfied with the recognition of his talent by the computer giant, the other, from a more critical perspective, detects a kind of undercover work. “I think this time it’s really well done. It’s all so damn well, so well tied together, that we don’t even know we’re working when we’re working.”

Agnieszka Polska, How the Work is Done, 2011, 6’24’’
In 1956 a group of students from the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts locked themselves in the sculpture and ceramics workshop, transforming a daily workplace into a space of passive existence. In her quasi-documentary, Agnieszka Polska recreates the strike. Juxtaposing her inherent lack of action, not far from an artistic performance, with animations that show the monotonous nature of daily creative work, the artist poses a question about the social efficacy of artists’ effort.

Anna Moreno, Select the right location, 2014, 33’
A city is being flooded, and five artists take refuge on the roof of the contemporary art museum, each with the object they have decided to save from the disaster. In Select the Right Location, Anna Moreno presents the flood as a metaphor for the current situation in the world of culture, with the loss of support and funding, leaving the museum as the only possible salvation. Through the dialogue that develops between the artists while they wait for the disaster to pass, she analyzes the situation that art professionals are experiencing today and their expectations for the future. In the end, the characters decide not to move and occupy the museum, in a position of passive violence.

Chto Delat?, Museum Songspiel: The Netherlands 20XX, 2011, 25’21’’
The script takes place in the context of an imaginary scenario of Dutch politics in the year 20XX, where all immigrants are illegal in the country. The museum seems to be the only institution where they can avoid deportation. The film raises the question about what role the museum and thus also art might be forced to play in political circumstances taken from the reality of the current political situation in Russia; it is a kind of acid test of how a socially concerned art could operate under strong control pressure from populist nationalist governments.