Goodnight, Mother Dystopia
When I close my eyes I see a world that exists in my mind. This world that I’m seeing is different to the one I live in - it’s darker, denser, lonelier and it’s out of order. It’s defined by many who live in poverty, and a few who live in luxury. It’s redefining the objects that define our present. When our ecological systems have collapsed further and further and human greed has peaked and revealed itself through corporate governance, what will our world look like? I see very specific images in my head when asking myself this. Shapes that will dominate cityscapes and clothing and materials that will overtake our visual input. When assuming that our current system will collapse and stop existing, redeveloping into a place of order through chaos and peace thorough control, I associate my daily life with a lot of temporality. Hope and fear, two essential parts of the human psyche play an important part within my artistic vision. I create under the hypothesis that fear is a bigger driver for change than hope. When we’re hopeful, we act slower and less impactful, we assume an idealised outcome and give away control to what we believe is fate or ‘the good’. When we’re fearful, we understand that threat is immediate and incoming, we understand that what will change entails negative impact on our individual but we try to act in order to avoid it. In Germany, the fear of the jewish people lead to a change of political systems, ideology, moral and human principles - an unimaginable amount of systemic change with fear being one of its biggest drivers. I don’t wish for a world that’s void of joy or justice and shines through dystopia, I wish for the opposite. But for as long as I can remember, this world exists in my mind and I can’t ignore it, and I feel responsibility to show what it looks and feels like.
“Goodnight, Mother Dystopia” by Sufyan Belhoche
Our future world is darker, denser, hungrier, lonelier and out of order. In a world of displacement through conflicts and crises, personal items and physical objects take on new meanings. This image features a concrete-built setting with 3 items placed around it: A pillow, a porcelain sheep and a soft-drink can used as a vase hat contains a flower. While I’m talking about the loss of culture through this image, all these items are symbols of diverse human life - but put together feel random and out of place. My goal was to make my audience rethink the way we live and understand that our way of life is a temporary reflection of the world we live in, of global circumstances and political balances. When my professor at Central Saint Martins first saw this images, he said to me hat “It’s disturbing because we recognise the objects, but don’t recognise the place”.
The time and place of this image are up for interpretation and while I often talk abut the world I imagine as a future scenario, the idea that this image translates already exists in our current world. Globally 82.4 million people were forcibly displaced at the end of 2020 as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order. Many of these people had to flee their current lives with nothing but a few items they were able to take with them or had collected. These items take on new meanings in a world where functionality is demonstrated through practicality and mobility.
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