Marking Time

Marking Time, 2020, is an illustrated paper ‘victory’ spiral of colonisation, checking off promises of humanity’s success while delivering sustained inhumanity and authoritarian cruelty. The march of progress, begins as an oversized toilet roll, for your convenience.

How do we reframe success and a life well lived?

Artists: Jen Lyons-Reid, Carl Kuddell

SOLASTALGIA TV

Solastalgia TV, 2020, is a Shrine to Civilization, an invitation to meditate on nostalgia, when media was still full of promise and progress was worth bargaining for.

Go on, you know the jingles.

How do we live without dead time?

Concept: Jen Lyons-Reid, Carl Kuddell, Felix Weber

Sculptor: Felix Weber

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Bunker Rulz 6: The myth of inevitable progress underpins colonizing domination and theft. The Colony proports that injustice - slavery, invasion, extraction, profiteering - is essential for the progress of civilization.

When confronted with the inevitability of our global situation we can either come to terms with our loss and our involvement, or double down on excusing our denial. Bargaining becomes an avoidance to face justice, reality, death. We beg, we doubt, we petition higher forces, appeal to our superstitious selves, offer deals to our demons, ask for redemption if we promise to behave… Imagined as rational, linear, enlightened thoughts these thinly disguised blame narratives are sticky: Why me, pick on someone else, it is not my fault, I have done so much good, we’d be living in caves without progress, at least we brought civilization… And there it is, survival of the normalised supremacist thinking, no mention of the damage, no curiosity for the incredible wisdom of other cultures, a lineal jump to the thought ship that is sinking us all.

Marking Time, Fabrik Arts Lobethal, Nov 2020. Photo Sam Roberts.

How do we represent our bargains with power and privilege?

What does the past, present and future look like when we define time as a linear force of nature, the harbinger of inevitable progress? What is time? Why do we imagine it runs in a straight line, when it is a fickle experience, that warps with our emotions? What stories do we share about the success of civilization? Whose stories do we omit? Who benefits from maintaining domination?

How do we reframe success and a life well lived?

Provocateurs corner: In the name of inevitable progress we trade in poisoned comfort, claiming civilization’s achievement as leverage against the mountainous pile of corpses, the escalating true costs of enlightenment: Slavery, genocide, plunder, rape and destruction on a planetary scale, offering the wonders of civilization to the very few.