Escape Allee
2017
Installation
2000 x 700 x 300 cm
A shopping street selling ideas, life styles, political agendas and entertainment - like Facebook but in real space. All messages compete of attention with the same intensity. Functioning democracy needs the citizens to be well-informed, rather than distracted.
Video art: Tak Acker
Sound art: Sami Kiiski
Escape Allee
An installation consisting of twenty display windows forming a street, with video, sound, light, and other elements.
Escape Allee is basically a shopping street, selling no objects but world views, like Facebook but in real space, that one can walk through. Propaganda, advertisement, sincere cries for a better world – all on the same level and intensity. All in all, it is about the erosion of democracy. How to vote, when all nonsense and hidden agendas are equally to news?
Customized coffee, customized pets, music to fit your age and peer group offer us crutches to form an identity fitting the social media. … and this is how we can be classified and targeted as citizens and consumers. Until things can be replaced by their opposites without anybody noticing.
The true one percent gang members are also a looming constant presence. Citizens only have a standing place in the audience of the theater of this new version of „democracy“. It did not matter how many millions of people demonstrated on the streets of London or any other city, the war in Iraq was needed for the economy. Equally we can protest all we want against the destruction of Northern or tropical forests – placing a vote directly in the rubbish bin is equally effective.