Week 179_ May Day
May Day
featuring Achinoam Alon
curated by Ángels Miralda
Lemoyne Project c/o Feld
Feldstrasse 121, 8004 Zurich
A slow drip of a viscous material congeals into a solid mass. Wax and honey are made by bees, specifically worker bees, whose hexagonal designs are arranged by the hive-mind. From the day of birth, these labourers are assigned with a societal order – a responsibility to their queen.
May Day is labour’s festivity, a celebration of production by the erasure of work. Abolishing work could be possible with automation, but today it seems more likely to experience the end of the world than the end of work. Never before have we toiled more hours under 0-hour-contracts and countless methods of social self-surveillance. Algorithms outpace our thinking, collecting online and offline “cookies” and replacing domestic labour. The female voices of our first mass-servants Alexa and Siri strive to seduce and to please.
Our unconscious desires surround us through targeted ads. Prediction itself has always been a business that homogenises the population. Fortune cookies were first served in San Francisco where today’s tech companies crowd the Bay Area. Like palmistry, or tarot, it is based on systemic methods of applying data and generalised formula – and yet what would happen if we knew the future?
Containing a fortune to fit demand – a reading of 2 degrees Celsius in the form of a high-end-fashion logo marks a dystopian present in which social action is relegated to corporate brands and thus dependent on profit motives. The “reading” of 2 degrees refers to our environmental point of no return – a universal prediction to which each individual will be undoubtedly affected in the not-so-distant future.
When it slowly melts, changes its outlines and transforms its shape as it approaches the water, does it remain the same as before? Scientific projections of environmental cataclysm strike no emotion. AI and jellyfish will survive in the future landscape – bees and humans will find a different fate. Sea-snail shapes adapt to the inside of our ‘ear snail’ of our inner ear. Beeswax scales to wax produced by the human body. A mechanical humdrum, Balenciaga-sponsored-apocalypse-shelters, larval bodies occupying hexagonal frames. Another May Day passes on our warming planet. The wax gets softer.
Achinoam Alon approaches materials as symbolic cues, harmonic gestures that weave together traditions of the past with our unmistakeable future. She is currently studying sculpture at AdBK Nuremberg (Prof. Michael Stevenson) and AdBK Munich (Prof. Nicole Wermers). Recent projects include Your Epidermis is Showing, Galerie Duglas, 2018 (solo); My Olives Have Seen, Akademie Galerie, 2018 (group); Earthship is Sinking / Bring Your Own Cameltoe, Die Vitrine, 2018 (solo); Cosy, Crunchy Circuits and Infinite Crawl, 2018, AdBK, Nuremberg.
Àngels Miralda is a writer and curator based in Terrassa. She was guest lecturer at the AdBK Nuremberg in December 2018.
