artist statement : âan alter-economy of becoming-elsewhereâ
anique vered, 3 November 2016
As a part of the Elsewhere: A Living Museum artist residency
yes thereâs certainly a care there.
and why wouldnât there be? Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â if thereâs life thereâs difference
â changed time, changed morphology
and if thereâs difference, there needs to be something that attends to the in-between.
This project has been an experiment in attending to difference and understanding power.
A baring of daily life as an artwork, it has sought to prompt and reveal change in a thinking-making-collectivity by crafting a speculative world exploring alternate social and economic forms. The project asked fourteen Elsewhere staff, interns and artists to participate in a seven-day durational encounter throughout the âliving-systemâ of the museum. The scales of the encounter were up to them; where the projectâs mediums of invitation, performative action and spatial intervention were undertaken with consent, and with degrees of engagement to choose from.
 Daily invitations scattered through the building hosted the central process for participants â some kind of âexpansion of Selfâ into worlds of relational intensities and on towards a living with difference, with change. Responsive to the conditions, they employed koen-like written abstractions to lure participants into possible states, perspectives and action. The intention was to enable certain affective and other atmospheres seen necessary for the process; to dismantle certain learned characteristics associated to colonial and patriarchal epistemologies and social norms; and to unfold qualities of an alter-economy into the daily life of participants â to experiment with another way of living-collectivity. Participants were asked to trace their experience or observations somehow - tracing seen as marking, as moving, as notating, as being-with. Marks of moments emerged throughout the museum as the durational encounter continued: masking tape, red yarn, cards, objects, words. And these too moved as the worlds did.
Underpinning the invitations and traces were a series of collective readings and isolated performative gestures exploring reproductive labour and queer life. âTransitional objectsâ sewn by participants while reading and discussing social reproducing movements, were then gifted back to them with âCare instructionsâ to accompany them through the projectâs process. Cookies were baked daily alongside the invitations, where while donning a dainty apron the artist questioned the domestication of appetition, regularly f*cking up the cookies, by accident.
Ultimately, the project has been an experiment in becoming-with change. A kind of unknown exploration in the felt-duration of transforming-life. A kind of moving with the textures-of-difference as a means to live, in lieu of relying on imposed structures of governing Self and collective. An ode to literally âbecoming-elsewhereâ, it is hoped that the project will continue indeterminately in the lives of spaces, systems, people, objects etc. However, as a way of marking the transition out of the active speculative world, participants will gather to gift ânothingnessâ to their transitional object. To mark the passing of change. To open the space for uselessness and gesture towards an unbinding from the terms of use and worth todayâs societies tend to be lead by. To allow difference in.
Left behind, to accompany the marks in their disappearing life will be a cartography of the alter-economy. An analysis of the speculative world through political economic and post-structuralist lenses: a mapping out of another kind of power-value-distribution system. A crude attempt at giving form to the formless: a gesture to the always-already possibility of becoming-elsewhere.
