In Ekklesia

- Text by Maximilian Steinborn

Isabella Fürnkäs presents a dystopian techno-economic future where there is no space for human language or human labour. Fürnkäs’ video installation In Ekklesia (2015) offers a speculative vision of labour in the era of robotics. A projection screen, resting on a pile of kinetic sand, depicts industrial machines at work. Footage of different industrial machines and robots is interspersed with images of ballpoint pen drawings by Fürnkäs, as well as documentation of rave culture. The mix of industrial imagery and party culture echo each other as the robotic movements seemingly move in time with the technoid sounds.

The growing automatization of unskilled labour leads to a rise in unemployment and work precarity. What started as the Fordist dream of a growing economy turned into a nightmare. Today, job insecurity, worklessness and financial instability preoccupy a generation of anxious and disassociated workers. Fürnkäs grasps the discrepancy between intimacy and productivity, labour and leisure, between euphoria and anxiety by layering image, sound and lyric in this moving image installation. The fast images are interspersed by moments of stasis and dreariness.

“I am so sad”

“I am transparent”

“I am losing my language”

The loss of language the vocalist refers to here, invokes a loss of power and control. The kinetic sand, framing the projection screen, suggests the quicksand-like quality of a system that once it grabs you, won’t let go. As Mark Fisher wrote, capitalism is “a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.”

-  Text by Marian Stindt

The title, In Ekklesia, comes from the Greek word ‘ecclesia,’ which refers to the democratic parliament that served Athens in its halcyon days by being open to male citizens every other year. Solon, an Athenian legislator and a sage, allowed all citizens to serve the parliament regardless of their social class in BC 594. The Ecclesia made decisions about war, military strategies, and all judicial and administrative issues. This work satirizes various facets of humans and machines in the 21st century, unconsciously within a dystopian environment.

Isabella Fürnkäs introduces a method of combining and overlaying countless images in her work, providing the new experience of sensations that act in ambiguous flows, movements, interference, and interjection. The piece is about the new metaphysical and material connections appearing through digital conversations that are divorced from the general notion of time and space, as well as isolation and alienation. 

- Text by Hyun Jeung Kim