SCUM SCAM SCUM, 14a, Hamburg, 2021

A metaplay is a fictional construct that tells us no character can really die, because characters do not exist, really. It’s a paradoxical performative SCAM in which the subject cannot recognise itself as real in terms of the provided stage set, while catching itself in the act. There is an actor playing the architect who cannot be killed. After all, a fictional death is not a real death. Indeed, the architect character cannot be killed, because he is really just an actor, with an existence off the stage. If Frieder had killed Gerrit on the set of his previous film, the architect would have lived on, and become the role for another friend of Frieder’s (supposing of course that Frieder’s murder remained without real consequences). The metaplay tells us that whenever there is a stage set, there is no reality, and consequently, no real consequences. Now, one is logically inclined to ask, when are we ever in a situation that is not staged? Or, moreover, how do we recognize reality? Following this line of thought, one may think of language and the social roles that are constructed on the fictional stage of the commonplace. The cruelty of the commonplace renounces the potential for real injuries to occur. The commonplace, a universal perspectival tool we supposedly have in common, constructs an objectivist model of reality in which individual emotional and physical realities are supposed to find expression. The supposition that individual experience could be captured in a universal rationale proves absurdly false. The attempt to articulate individuality through language, or other forms of human rationality (i.e. design, architecture) emerges as cruelty, and utterances are like harsh corners, causing injury to soft flesh. The injury is the consequence of a staged scene. The cruelty happens precisely in the denial of this injury that one had thought to be real, but that cannot find acknowledgement in the given rationale. Pretense is a form of cruelty, which attempts to uphold a state of invulnerability for the pretender. It produces as a side effect a lingering sense of disgust, staleness, and profound discomfort, because the reality of the injury lingers, somewhere, beyond its commonplace representation. Various modalities of this cruelty operate under the rationale of stability, harmony, and invulnerability: Sentimentality, numbness, cynicism, humor, blame, accusation, are attempts to neutralize and obscure the suffering which is felt in real rejection, oppression, loss, physical pain, humiliation, and social ostracization. (...)

Text by Luzie Meyer (to read the full text click here)

↳ films shown in this exhibition: 'Scum Scam Scum'