Aiming not to revisit idealisations about outdated futures, but rather to problematise the exoticisation of the future as a form of permanent novelty, ‘abandon all hope ye who enter here’ uses semi-retrospective as a starting point, seeking to focus the aura of novelty and the haughtiness some artistic proposals and techniques assume in relation to their historical moment. In essence, the show sketches one idea: bringing the future of yesterday into the future that succeeded it, presenting it as the past. Thus the idea of refusal: “how can the technological hellscapes we are producing – and the futures they are making – be refused or rejected?”[1].
Above all, there is the intention of reducing the forms of a possible future mythology to the condition of permanent promise. The notion of ’present’ is displayed as a form of archive, documentary and immediate criticism. In the artwork, the future is like a political act, either by its lack of commitment or by the way it is considered an element of concern. In one way or another, its presence is approached as a symptom of an idea of value. It allows diagnosis, problematisation.
Most works in display share an interest in the intersection between religion/myth/spirituality, technique and politics. If the aim is to explore the idea of value, it makes sense that it should. Value – in general, but also in art in particular – is always defined as a complex relationship between the conditions of possibility from a technical point of view and the way they are embedded in the tension between beliefs/desires/mythologies and the real world. In this case, the aura of the future is a myth. Intersection uses this to problematise it, satirize it. Several myths, in fact: NFTs, 3D modelling, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, data storage, cryonics.
Between rooms, the collective Underground Division presents the steps of the manual ‘Queering Damage’, a kind of document/performance that tries to ascertain the damages resulting from “patriarchal-colonial techno-sciences, (of) turbo-capitalism and totalitarian informatics”[2], delimiting the rooms where the other works are exhibited.
‘The Dust’, a video work by Tianzhuo Chen, presents at the entrance of the second room one of the key questions: does the novelty – technical, but above all the value generated by it – correspond to being part of an epoch or wanting to be? In other words, is the presumed exception with which certain techniques, categories or denominations present themselves, the aura, a natural consequence of a rupture or a place defined at the outset with that claim? For instance, the NFTs, heralded as a revolutionary element, capable of triggering a new working regime, and even a new artistic landscape, do they deliver what they promise or are they just a speculative narrative, resulting from the repeated urge to occupy that place?
We can also ask whether the cryonic process, a practice that allows the preservation, through freezing, of corpses who believe that, at some point, science will develop to resurrect them, is not just another moment of assessing the possibility of extension and transformation of the digital landscape into a material landscape. At least, that’s the scenario pointed out by ‘Dawn Chorus: Beta’ by Stine Deja, using children’s animations, arranged on screens lying in prams, as if they were fetuses.
In ‘Mad Man’s Laughter’, a video work, Alaa Mansour explores a different side of this landscape, stretching a face into several transformations over an hour. The trails of the faces always take on a new form, always on the same plane, always in the same space. Something that only seems possible in a virtual landscape. ‘Entanglement’, by the Annex collective, responds in the opposite room with an installation of cables, wires, coal and fans. Several videos play simultaneously, on the scale of a temple: information occupies a physical space; storage pollutes and has sound. In other words, the idea that the limits of the body have been blurred, as the very dimension of the image might have us believe, is a mirage at best.
‘Cihad Caner, The Subterranean Imprint Archive’ by Lo-Def Film Factory, and ‘Remaining Threads’ by Ibiye Camp reinforce this. On one side, a stage where a puppet play generates volume only through the shadow of a screen; on the other, a research project into the role of the African continent in the development of the first atomic bombs and the ramifications and effects of that participation. In the background of the lights, of the ever-clean world of the projections, is extraction, mines, rubbish.
