Werkstück / Piece of Work - Hannah Kuhlmann, Charlotte Rohde, Elisabeth Prehn
Vernissage:
THU 19.01.23 | 19h
Expo:
20.01.-29.01.2023
MO-SUN 15h - 20h
GOLD+BETON | Ebertplatzpassage
The better version of ourselves is born with storytelling. May it be in a job interview, our instagram feed or an artist statement. The image we present to others evokes trust. Trust in us, trust in our assets. And with their rise, also our stock price is growing. So we build our narratives to be ready for a stand up elevator pitch. Of course, the most promising story wins. And the winner goes home with the money.
Ursula Le Guin describes in ‚The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction‘, how the first tool of humans wasn’t a spear but must have been a bag or some form of container. Nutrition was covered by seeds and other foods that could be collected, which they needed a storage for – the container. But what everyone remembers and what made it into art was the glorious stories of the hunters with their spears. The heros and heroines of the party after a long day. Not that the meat was needed to cover nutritional needs, no, it was just the better story.
Todays act of storifying ourselves was recently given the name ‚Lorecore‘ by Shumon Basar, who describes this phenomenon as one of late capita- lism. A stage in where we are all characters.
The commodification of self and self-branding though has always existed. It is part of communication within a society. According to what surrounds us and what is seen as worthy, you present what you have. The commodi- fication of self was there, the hunters and their stories were there, Lorecore was there. Just in another dress. The process didn’t really change much since the Middle Ages for example, there are just more social rights now thankfully, and more words. Thus, more options to define ourselves. The realm of language is expanding with every neologism, until it allows infinite identifications.
We learned a lot from social media about us and the image of ourselves. We are aware that we do storytelling. The stock market is thriving, cras- hing, thriving, crashing. The question is what drives the story in the end, what values make the story a good story?