A video exhibition exploring the #Shifting Value theme. Shifting the notion of value implicitly changes the economy, since value is the measure of benefit. Can this shift in perception, besides saving us from an environmental crisis, also improve our well being and make us feel more fulfilled?

The Always Trust Me installation by Gijs de Boer plays with the concept of trust, an important concept for the way we have organized our economy. Cassandra’s Building Climate Futures video explores how speculation could change the future starting from the recent oil price crises. In Outside, inside my nature Alessandro Cugola and Gianmarco Causi wonder about the concepts of inside and outside and explore the blurring and changing boundaries between these two poles.  

Always Trust Me, Gijs de Boer

Next to the temple façade of a traditional bank, an ATM looks modest. Boring even. Gijs de Boer is fascinated by things that seem designed to look undesigned, especially for machines we need to trust. Perhaps because he recognizes the trick. As a frequent non-smiler on group photos, he knows the least honest pose is the pose of not-posing. Appearing ‘neutral’ secures a position of power over the observer or user, while this same ‘neutrality’ offers them a feeling of clarity and control. A win-win for modernism. Yet do we need to be fooled to trust things? 

Gijs de Boer searches for a more honest aesthetic for technological devices we commonly trust blindly, such as an ATM. Inspired by sampling and citing methods from pop culture, he copies a seemingly neutral ATM incompletely, leaving clues to reveal its modernist mask. ‘Always Trust Me’ tests if you can trust an honest bluff.

Building Climate Futures, Chiara Di Leone, Anastasia Noga and Laura Cugusi (Cassandra Collective)

Speculation is never just predictive. It doesn’t only account for the probability of certain futures, but has the power to shape and reconfigure the material reality of the present. On the twentieth of April 2020, the price of oil went negative for the first time in history sending seismic shocks through the global economy. This sudden oil-price shipwreck visualized how deeply entangled the present and the future are. It served as evidence of how the nature of raw materials can arbitrarily shift across the spectrum between resource and waste. 

Cassandra Collective‘s speculative video ‘Building Climate Futures’  investigates how to acknowledge this “creative” power of value in its fundamental economic sense, and links it to the creative power of art in imagining different possibilities for the future.  

Outside, inside my nature, Alessandro Cugola and Gianmarco Causi

Inside and outside define the thresholds of our perceptions and our way of being: during the confinement the balance between those two poles was altered, allowing us to consider our fragility and nature. The video by Alessandro Cugola and Gianmarco Causi shows rendered boundaries on the scale of the body, then to the perimeter of our living space, and finally to the dimension of our consciousness. While exploring the shift of these definitions, ‘Outside, inside my nature’ question how we perceive and determine our territory.  

Join the event

On November 12th at 17:00 CET, you can watch the video exhibition on our Economia Festival YouTube channel and Baltan Laboratories Facebook Page, where the video will remain accessible afterwards.

In addition to watching the video exhibition, there is the opportunity to join the conversation in a live Q&A with Gijs de Boer, Cassandra Collective and Alessandro Cugola. If you want to join this Q&A, please join the Zoom meeting. The room will be open from 16:45 on, at 17:00 we will start with an introduction.