Connection / Disconnection - fluid interactions; asking: Who am I

Yesterday

Emerging technologies allow capital to flow at ever greater speed with efficiencies that satisfy the capitalist system’s desire for constant innovation, feed-back loops and profit. Labor is constantly being purchased, exploited, and discarded. Time and labor coexist within a framework of temporality and redundancy. Labor is purchased and consumed along with the products of labor and just as easily discarded. Only the truly skillful escape the tentacles of this cannibalistic machine.

If caught in the tentacles of this system we must construct and reconstruct ourselves at every moment, question ourselves, analyze ourselves, criticize ourselves, transform ourselves, abandon our existing identity and acquire a completely different identity.

Uncertain, ignorant, powerless, silent: The ordinary and everyday at the mercy of flows and networks outside of any real agency or enabling structure.

Today, in a drastic turnaround, I met X.

X is a Mannequin. He has worked for Gap for more than 10 years, but because of the rise of e-commerce and the covid-19 pandemic, he was abandoned and sold by Gap for $10.

X who was born of, for and above all to flatter capitalist ideals and is now rejected by the very system he served.

I took him home.

Together with several artists we created a second life of possibilities for X outside the system and yet, perhaps part of another system. Nevertheless, a life of his own outside of capitalism.

In the interaction between X and these artists, X gained his own memory; while at the same time becoming a mirror – reflecting the fragility and anxiety of these artists and ordinary people alike.

X

因为更早的商业转型和新冠，位于芝加哥最繁华的街道的商业街，密歇根大道上的华丽一英里上的GAP倒闭了。

GAP甩卖了所有物品，甚至不止物品：

所有员工都被裁员。连为他们工作了7年的人体模特模型也被甩卖。和被甩卖的衣服不一样，这些人体模型的贡献的方式更像是员工。

资本依靠着电子金融可以迅速的从GAP撤资，然后转移到其他地方。但是物理的“人”被留下了。等待他们的是又一次下岗，然后去学习新的技能，构建一个新的职业身份，寻找新的工作，然后，等待下一次被资本抛弃。

如果陷入这个流动的系统里，我们必须时刻构建和重构自己，质疑自己，分析自己，批评自己，改造自己，放弃现有的身份，获得一个完全不同的身份。

不止是资本世界让每个人感受到这种流动性：我们处在一个全球流动的时代（即使现在逆全球化的浪潮也不容忽视），我在我的家乡是一个中产家庭里的女孩子；在北京上学的时候，我是一个来自二线城市的流动人口；在美国，我是一个没有长居资质的亚裔女性。我在每个阶段都必须不断的重塑出新的自我。

不确定、无知、无能为力、沉默：是我们受*流动的现代性所支配的平凡的每一天。

*流动的现代性 Liquid Modernity，Book by Zygmunt Bauman