The initial creative development for this endeavour was seeded through an Australian Council grant (Experimental Arts). It has also been supported through NAVA and a number of residences conducted in Europe and North America throughout 2015.
This is a project conceived and directed by Rebecca Conroy in collaboration with a range of partners and artist led practitioners.
The following iterations are planned for the period 2016 – 2018
MONEY LAUNDERING —An artist led experimental business incubator (2015 – 2018)
DATING AN ECONOMIST —A series of performative dinner dates with economists and a 4 part experimental audio documentary (2016)
WALKING TO THE LAUNDROMAT —An audio walk exploring mindfulness and dirty laundry (2016)
MARRICKVILLE SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS – A creative accounting and artist-led curriculum for studying and developing new ways to do economy.
IRON LADY —A performance installation and ironing service for the finance district of Sydney (2016)
DIAGRAM OF A WASHING MACHINE —A poster print and performance lecture (2017)
CURRENCY —An expanded exhibition format (2018)
A Very Beautiful Laundromat is a ‘going concern’
This project also intends to bring the artistic labouring body into literal contact with finance capitalism. By experimenting with the business model of the Laundromat, this artist-led project intends to establish and operate a laundromat as an intervention into the feast and famine economy of the much lauded ‘creative’. Whilst the laundromat is a ‘going concern’, A Very Beautiful Laundromat will also serve as a platform for a range of other tasks and initiatives that imagine and test out how we can ‘do economy differently’.
The curatorial side of the project will pursue an experimental platform that hopes to render visible the flows of capital and bring together artists, artist groups, curators, finance managers, traders and economists to explore the numerous ways the discursive instruments of finance shape and invent new myths around economy and ‘fictitious capital’. It will attempt, for useful and playful reasons, to chart the synergies and parallels, both actual and imagined, of artistic production and the language of economy—principally those concerning risk, speculation, and exchange value.