Raising dust

Naked Freedom © Marina Gržinić & Aina Šmid 

Raising Dust explores themes of place and identity in post-colonial Europe, giving a voice to eastern european artists which work focuses on geopolitical minorities. Calvert 22 opens the frontiers to what is seen in Europe as a territorial periphery. The show is theoretical but exposes the aftermaths of capitalism in Europe.



















Naked Freedom © Marina Gržinić/ Aina Šmid


In her essay De-grading capital(ism) and its production of fear, Marina Gržinić denounces hierarchy, surveillance, intensified privatization, discrimination and exploitation as the ill-beings of the capitalist machine. Their consequences, isolation, racism and social segregation, are exemplified in Naked freedom, an accompanying video.
Following in the steps of Achille Mbembe who swaps the term 'biopolitics' for 'necropolitics' - politics that manages life through the production of death - Marina Gržinić coins the term 'necrocapitalism', to refer to a system that pretends to create a better life while solely accumulating capital and producing death.
In the filmed performance, artists, musicians and youth workers from Ljubljana oppose to capitalism and colonialism with a creative, alternative and radical positioning.

40,000,000 © Zbyněk Baladrán/ Photo © Steve White

The incapacity to think for oneself is another nevrosis of the capitalist regime in 40,000,000. Conditioned by primal desires and subordinated to consumerism, we insure the perpetuation of its system.

AcDcWc © Saso Sedlacek 

Slovenian Saso Sedlacek recycles pipes and plastic bottles into an object of commodity. The toilet-powered chandelier switches on by transforming human excrement into electricity.

Street Sweepers and Broom makers in Jodhpur © Navroze contractor

Throughout the exhibition, the archetype of the broom is used as leading metaphor for physical labour : from the streets of Jodhpur in India to the hills of Romania, people survive by fetching stalks and grasses handcrafted into traditional brooms.
















The curse of the Hedgehog © Dumitru Budrala 

In The curse of the hedgehog, an old woman tells the legend of a mythic hedgehog, exposing how the Baiesi people share their outcast status with this animal. The film follows a Roma gypsie family trading handmade brooms and baskets with local farmers in exchange for food and money. Isolated in their romanian mountains, endlessly fighting hunger, the Baiesi are poorer than before capitalism. Anthropologist Dumitru Budrala unveils the truth about what happens at the end of the food chain.

The Bees' Police

Policing genes - 2010 © Thomas Thwaites


Policing genes, futuristic project of designer Thomas Thwaite, is funded by the Centre for Security and Crime Sciences to stop illegal and unlicensed pharmaceutical drugs being grown from genetically modified plants. Thwaites attended a crash course in Synthetic Biology and now anticipates that since it is easy to download DNA sequences from the internet, and insert the genes of one plant into another, the average gardener can potentialy transform broad bean into an hybrid with the DNA of cocaine.

















© Thomas Thwaites

These possible futures are influenced by the current laboratories experiences on tomatoes that produce a vaccine for Alzheimer's disease, or potatoes that immunize against Hepatitis B. To help the London Police, using roof beehives, Thwaites has thought of using the genius of bees hunting for pollen to detect the producing of illegal plant-made-pharmaceuticals : what more efficient police than the bee which goes everywhere - indoors and outdoors - with little noticing ? Policing genes implies there is no limit to city surveillance and state control.










Video on display at the Wellcome Collection, projects created for the Design Interactions department at the Royal College of Art, offering an alternative view on how science could influence our future, inspire debate about the human consequences of technological futures, both positive and negative.