floorless floorless is an open affinity group of artists and activists, formed in the year 2000 and based in Copenhagen and London. floorless works with the creative process as a collective insurrection in the space between fine arts, public art, performance, design, architecture, video, music/sound and writing. floorless is also the publisher of the experimental magazine In The Red as well as the 2nd hand book project Triple 6. floorless is mostly working with the time- and site-specific, using ready-made or found elements from their given surroundings, which are detourned through artistic application and the relations with the context, thus creating texts, posters, stencils or prints specifically for events. Mostly the works are open, with a kind of event character, progressing until they are destroyed by either time gone by or the end of the context for which they were produced. Reoccurring themes are the continuous displacements of meaning and a tendency to make questions of form visible, so the viewer is able to see how the works were made. This is double ended since it is both an open call to Do It Yourself and at the same time an attempt to show that the principles of form are also principles of society, with all the autonomous elements collaborating to make a whole with a flat, non-linear, and non-hierarchic structure maintaining room for difference. It also explains the connections to Public Art running through the works of floorless, since public space is the stage where communication and democracy is being performed (and circumvented). Other reoccurring themes are alienation, the unheimlich and the desire for utopian free-play and free-thinking. The objective of floorless is to create a non-dogmatic and open alternative, which can be used for debating democracy, justice and liberation. It aims at getting people to think and decide for themselves or just picking up the fucking marker, through the artistic and experimental use of different medias, thus creating an independent, mental free-space. The overall goal is a discussion of the value of things, for which reason the artistic practice often resembles a kind of semiotic terrorism, a communication guerilla questioning what we are getting told and shown by the systems of power and offering alternative representations of the world and its issues. floorless represents diversity through a fragmented structure in an effort to establish an aesthetic counter-culture (or no-culture), from which critique and discussion of reality becomes possible. This is on one hand an attempt to liberate art from its current context as a self-promotional tool and transform it into a new confrontational form and, on the other, an attempt to show people that they are themselves artists with the power to form and reform their own lives and the world they live in. The power to reinvade your own personal space is already yours and only demands direct and autonomous action: The power to invade spaces with others is also there and it is in this that we can create some form of sustainable living. floorless believes that art is not just fermentation for neo-capitalism and neo-management, but that it is possible to move beyond this. Art can be used as a medium that investigates different types of utopias/dystopias and social alternatives. The dynamics for this is created by the clash of different points of view that meet in one collaborative work, which, like society and the self, is one and many at the same time. floorless aims to create a standpoint for critical reflection about society and the feelings and relations between its inhabitants. This is the reason why many of floorless’s works have the character of an event, since the event is that which encapsulates the now and here and, at the same time, points towards a possible future moment. The event functions as an act of calling a participating public into existence and inventing a new form of sociality based on the forms of action developed within the field of art itself. floorless believes that it is culture, not politics, that has the power to reform society and that the principles of form are pointing towards a future embedded in the avant-garde tradition of twentieth century art. In the final analysis it is a matter of replacing national governments with a system of self-governing by re-appropriating space for experimental use and thus demolishing the hierarchies of power. Art is not the problem, but the solution and everything is impossible only for as long as you don’t believe in it. |