Buck up - never say die. We’ll get along !
GloguaAir |
Berlin | 2025
In collaboration with Moksha Richards
Surrounded by paralysed witnesses with a clearly defined task. Charged with emotional value, part of our individual worlds.
Utilitarian forms made to serve. Decades in the same framework. Still functional, still standing. Cycles of consumption and industry. Memories of cracked shells, of stains and colour streaks from a previous pulped life. Recycled, reshaped, and marked by their pasts.
Demanded material accumulates presence, builds a character. The objects anthropomorphize into figures who have lived through repetition and rhythm. Carriers of evidence of what has passed through them, came, stayed, and left.
We were inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. The Tramp, reduced to a functional part of the machine, mirrors these objects. Designed for use, bent to utility. And yet he resists. He clowns, he dances, he escapes. In these systems of enforced rhythms, he remains alive. The Tramp and his companion are the only joyful spirits in a world of automata. They live by their wits, their humour, their movement.
The final card of Modern Times reads: “Buck up - never say die. We’ll get along !” A trace remains. A future stirs.
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Jonathan Joosten
Buck up - never say die. We’ll get along !
Jonathan Joosten & Moksha Richards
Buck up - never say die. We’ll get along !