Davide Ghelli Santuliana, Valentino Russo, Cathleen Owens, Carmen Dusmet Carrasco & Arthur Cordier:
My Goals Are Bigger Than Yours
Off the Grid
Periode: 12.03—28.05.2022
Davide Ghelli Santuliana, Valentino Russo, Cathleen Owens, Carmen Dusmet Carrasco & Arthur Cordier:
My Goals Are Bigger Than Yours
The concept of the residency project revolves around the question(s): How can the creative entrepreneur survive in a world of excessive competition and underpaid labour? How does business ethics (neoliberal ethics in particular) relate to the figure of the artist/designer? How does this change her habits or goals? How do artists respond to these challenges?
The exhibition project “My Goals Are Bigger Than Yours” wants to analyse the consequences of neoliberal policies on the individuals, and especially on the so-called “creatives”, meaning the broad range of (mostly) freelance workers operating in the fields of art and design. While the competition in the art field becomes more and more fierce, with increasingly scarce resources for the producers, the “creatives” find themselves in precarious social and economic conditions. We, as artists and designers, spend thousand of euros on our education and professional development, study complex theoretical issues and try to be engaged in “artistic research” — among other things — but at the same time our precarity seems more often than not to be bracketed and set aside — even though the conditions of our production pretty much shape our artistic Products.
“My Goals Are Bigger Than Yours” is a survey of these conditions, wherein the artists approach the aforementioned issues from different media and different perspectives: humorous, ironic, serious, committed, grotesque, fragmentary and condensed. The question then is: will you hire us?
Participating artists
Davide Ghelli Santuliana is a multimedia artist and researcher based in Amsterdam (NL). His practice spans across different media, from moving-images, to text, to sound design. In his research he is mostly interested in analyzing the effects of semiocapitalism on the individuals, in its social, economic and political effects, but also the intersection between semiocapitalism and artistic production. For this reason, he often employs different appropriation strategies — from a direct remix of found images, to citation and re-enactement of existing motives.
Valentino Russo is interested in the reuse and re-contextualization of images from online
sources — sometimes mixed with original material. This process mirrors the endless recycle of culture that takes place in our social-media based society, a landscape characterized by the impossibility to distinguish between real and fake, true and false, right and wrong.
Cathleen Owens is an artist and communications consultant currently based in The Hague, NL. Her work, which usually takes the form of performative installations, plays with the intersection of self-presentation, personal branding, and identity in an age where we’re all living our best selves online. Owens also serves as co-founder and CEO of lifestyle company Your Untapped Potential.
Arthur Cordier’s practice tackles the aesthetics of bureaucracy, entrepreneurship, and efficiency through relational, situational and contextually specific works, often self-reflecting upon artistic practice and the entangled economies of art in a production-driven society.
Carmen Dusmet Carrasco is a video artist and graphic designer based in The Hague. Beginning from personal experiences, her practice focuses on how socio-economic structures affect individual and collective identities. She understands her work as a contemplating lens of an uncertain future; a tool to speculate and reflect on the unpredictability of labour, survival, growing up, ageing, change, and hope. Her work manifests through moving-image, text, and sound, generally following a collaborative approach. Her research is complimented by her graphic design practice, teaching, workshops and co-running Home Cinema, an online video broadcast platform screening and archiving moving image works by young and emerging artists that answers to the question: what can we see together when we cannot see each other? Home Cinema is periodically activated through collaborations and open calls.
