Installationview Rum 46, 2006

LOGICAL ACTIONS
Dia slide installation

Studies of globalisation have identified the new fractures between the global and the local exploring the complex connections between the two. The point of departure of this work is not only the local, in terms of social spatial boundaries at the core of our identities, but also the local read through the gaze of everyday life. Moving around in my neighbourhood, it is easy to identify globalisation narratives that name the local as threaten by the global forces of market capitalism. “Public” spaces have been appropriated with increasing media marketing that may sell from cloth to airplane flights, speaking to our desires of being loved, of belonging, of being protected and safe. But, moving around in my neighbourhood it is also easy to identify other globalisation narratives that speak about resistance, insubordination and re-appropriation.

This work is grounded in an ongoing documentation of a three commercial billboards located in my neighbourhood. The work illuminates the everyday forms of resistance that open this closed landscape, created between market capitalism and consumers and illuminates a new arena through which neighbours speak to and with each other.
These “new cultural products” are not fixed, they change all the time like some kind of everyday conversation among citizens, like a silent and generous share of alternative knowledge and an invitation to subversive spaces. These new cultural products
are neither regulated or organised, a form of fighting back where the pleasure of destabilizing these enormous amount of market production in chaotic ways should not be sub-estimated. An everyday form of subversion that is transformed week after week, month after month.

Against the market production of billboards that commodifies public space, and destroy social bonds through the creation of the individualised desire of isolated consumers, the images presented narrates other stories, tells us about other needs and other people. But most of all re-codifies the local as a space where the interaction between people is more important that the interaction between capital and goods. In other words: they make our neighbourhood safe. They protect us. They create an inclusive we, when market capitalism speaks about exclusive I, they name the present and dream the future.