[Expanded exhibition and publication]
2018
An expanded curatorial platform and publication that stages provocations and propositions for how we might reimagine economy.
- The laundry as an instrument for keeping things clean, smooth and removed, and aligned with the invisible hand of the market and its relationship to money laundering and informal economies.
- The fe/male/trans body as washing machine – as a circulatory vascular system accumulating toxins and flushing, cleansing, passing through – as threshold, as change agent, as behind the scenes mess hall, as front of house box office hygienist
- The laundromat’s historical relationship with migrant populations, foreign bodies, immigrant and illegal labour, and the transmutations and porosity of unclean and dirty bodies.
- The rise of alternative currencies bit coin etc and its correlation with speculative finance capitalism and affective labour/creative labour.
- The emergence of the share-economy and the commodification of neighbourhood and the phenomena of place-making, urban renewal and artist led gentrification.
- The rise of the creative worker as the ultimate poster child for neoliberalism marked by its characteristic flexible, precarious, and ephemeral labour to produce intangible capital.
- The laundromat as a trojan vessel to mimic existing economic models in order to occupy from the inside out in a viral form, and following permaculture theory, to reintroduce a species that disrupts a toxic cycle and brings equilibrium to the ecosystem; to re-absorb/re-cycle the surplus/excess.
- Exploration of the excess of economy, following philosopher Georges Bataille and to extend his philosophy of General Economy into a making of new “economy” that preferences useless or excessive labour and production.
This exhibition is in development.
