How should we live?
Video, 2019. 15'00" | Stereo | 1:1 | Colour
The videoart “How should we live?” starts from a historical line about modernism and its way of shaping cities, going through psychological problems in the work environment until reaching paradoxical situations of our present day, events sewn on the internet and its timeless phenomena.
We move from disciplinary society to the civilization of individualistic self-control without any psychic infrastructure. The rise of depression and physical and mental fatigue are some of the causes of the current cloudy and oscillating period between apathy, anesthesia, transparency, post-truth, torment, endless work-fun, euphoria and fervor.
As the author Jonathan Crary quotes in his book 24/7: Late capitalism and the ends of sleep, “the oscillating human affections and emotions, which are only vaguely suggested by the notions of shyness, anxiety, unstable sexual desire, distraction or sadness. , have been unduly converted into disturbances and targeted for hugely profitable remedies. ”
As for modernity, part of its habits was formed around impersonal efficiency and dynamism in the face of imitation of mechanized rhythms. Thus, Crary states that the “feeling of individual ingenuity gives the temporary conviction that we are on the winning side of the system, somehow getting ahead; but, in the end, there is a generalized leveling of all users, transformed into indistinct objects of the same mass expropriation of time and praxis”.
Also Franco Bifo Berardi in the book “Respirare: Caos e Poesia” tries to reflect the possibility of thinking about a new way of life through the reactivation of the body within a rhythm other than that machinic. Therefore, I propose to think as in Augusto dos Anjos (brazilian poeta) poem, where inserted in this paradoxical freedom, I believe that it is urgent to wander “by the monotonies of the sidereal”, “dressed in incandescent hydrogen” until we find conscious observations about the failure to try to understand the present and project the future through the past, so that we can get rid of all the obedient control characterized by self-performance.
In the coexistence of these states, I think that these works help us to understand this uncertain and chaotic present, allowing to think the human being and his limits of life and work, in capitalism and in the technology that has been potentiating our thoughts about who we are and where we are going, while deceptively distracting us while we live in this time and space.