LIVE OR BUY

Present-day systems of consumption emphasize the construction of the sense of self through acquisition – having. They present the act of buying a house or upgrading to the latest tech innovation as a kind of “self-improvement”; and in some ways, it may be simpler and easier to have than to be or become. However, satisfying the individual desire to have drives ever-increasing wealth inequality, labour exploitation and environmental devastation, and within all this, “cultural producers” play a precarious and contradictory role.

Residency 16: Live or Buy has been developed with artist Nina Sarnelle, clothing designer Ida Falck Øien and clothing label HAiKw/. It will offer participants the opportunity to explore these critical questions in intimate, personal and physical ways. Sarnelle and Falck Øien plan to test the potential of dematerialised, interactive techniques (borrowed from areas such as live action role play, therapy, improvisation and social practice), to escape the pervasive logic of the free market and – through fantasy, allegory or live experiment – propose alternative forms of social or economic organization. Their goal is not to arrive at a grand solution but rather (in Donna Haraway’s phrase) to stay with the trouble, embracing doubt and working with failure and intuition to develop new practices of research, inquiry and “dirty hybrids” of resistance.

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