Slow Motion
Lola Arias
26 Nov–23 Jan 22
Anti-age capitalism tells us that old age is something we ought to fight against, eliminate, or at least conceal. We get old and are stowed away somewhere where productive society no longer has to see us, in more or less luxurious storage facilities. Elderly care—a series of arduous maintenance jobs—is shuffled off onto precariously employed workers.
Elderly care workers possess knowledge about being old and ageing that frequently remains invisible and vanishes from social awareness. In their daily bodily and interpersonal interactions with the elderly, they are obliged to strike a balance between efficiency and people’s needs: when bathing someone, helping them get out of bed and get dressed, conversing with them, touching their shoulder.
For two years, artist Lola Arias interviewed care workers, sociologists, city planners, gerontologists, and older people on the topics of age and care, multi-generational housing projects, and age and sexuality. The result of this research was the theatrical production Ich bin nicht tot (I’m not dead) and the short film Far away from Russia. This exhibition is centred around a futuristic instructional film, in which carers and elderly people demonstrate their everyday routines—a choreography of the relationships between caregivers and the people who need care.
Slow Motion is the fifth part of the exhibition series MY WORKING WILL BE THE WORK. on self/care, labour and solidarity curated by Linnéa Meiners and Jorinde Splettstößer.
About the artist
Lola Arias is a multimedia artist from Argentina. Her work brings together people who belong to a particular collective or socio-historical group, for example war veterans, former communists or migrant children, in formats such as theatre, film, literature, music and visual arts. In Arias’ works, they appear as the individuals they are. At the same time, they are tasked with representing themselves within the given context.
Within these process-oriented collaborations, Arias develops works that negotiate historical events, collective experiences and their impact across generations, societies and the individual. By overlapping reality and fiction, Arias creates intimate plays that reflect on the contingencies and fragilities of our own biographies and their inevitably unresolved relation to social and political realities.
Since 2007, her documentary theatre productions and re-enactments have been staged at Festival d’Avignon, Wiener Festwochen, Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Royal Court Theatre in London and Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin among others. Furthermore, Arias has done several exhibitions, durational performances and lecture series. In her exhibition Stunt Double at Monumento a las Víctimas del Terrorismo de Estado in 2016, four different installations rebuilt the last forty years of Argentinian social and political history. Since 2012, she curates My Documents, a lecture-performance cycle on personal archives. In 2017 she did Ways of Walking with a Book in Your Hand, a site-specific project for readers in libraries and public spaces. Her first feature film Theatre of War from 2018 received several prizes and was selected for the 68th Forum of the Berlinale Film Festival.
Team
CURATORS Jorinde Splettstößer and Linnéa Meiners
HEAD OF PRODUCTION Carolina Redondo
PR Helen-Sophie Mayr
PROJECT ASSISTANCE Dani Hasrouni
INSTALLATION TEAM Claudio Aguirre, Juan Manuel Blanco, Rachel B. McCollum, Danilo Cozzi, Felipe Monroy
TRANSLATIONS Gegensatz Translation Collective
GALLERY SUPERVISION Ferdinand Gieschke
TEAM LOLA ARIAS COMPANY
PRODUCTION Laura Cecilia Nicolás
CONCEPT Mikko Gaestel
HEAD OF TECH Matías Iaccarino
DESIGN José Delano
PRODUCTION ASSISTANCE Bibiana Mendes
The curators would like to thank the team of Galerie im Turm and of Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien: Stéphane Bauer, Sofía Pfister, Serkan Sevincli, Josef Stöhr as well as the gallery’s supervision team.
With the kind support of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe: Multi-sector Funding, Exhibition Fund Municipal Galleries and Fund Exhibition fees for visual artists.
Galerie im Turm is a facility of the district office Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg.
