ARBEJDSTITEL: OFFENTLIG URO ('Working title: Public unrest')
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Working Title: Public Unrest was a workshop/exhibition organized at SPLab in Aarhus from March 10 th to March 16 th in 2003. The event was arranged and curated by the Danish artist Jan Danebod with the intention of presenting and discussing languages of action in the public space.

floorless contributed to the event with a critical text about artistic activism and public space (published in Expert #2, 2003, 1/3) and as luxury street-activists. We invaded the street right across from SPLab in Mejlgade, Aarhus and hung up hundreds of A5 papers on a glass façade to form a hybrid of mixed medias.

This mosaic represented a street in the city in the streets of the city, a free space of play and desire. The walls contributed to public debate and thus to democracy under the slogan of todo es possible, nada es real (Spanish for ‘everything is possible, nothing is real’). In the massive collage a text was raining down on the streets, which were occupied by tanks and terror, while the surrounding walls were chanting about libertarianism and freedom from oppression in a poetic way. Different mediated and fragmented photomontages and texts contributed to the general sense of information overflow and the ‘unheimlich’, the latter word spanning a poster series depicting DNA, the city, the planet and the universe.

In the state of emergency that dominates the streets in the work, we point to the revolutionary aspect of hybrid and fragmented subjectivities (playing on the sensorial bombardment of established Medias) and the importance of debating and communicating ideas of democracy, justice and freedom from an alternative standpoint. Is it our walls, where the subject is free to participate in a debate about everyday life and the local/global environment, or, is it a tool for power and capitalism to advertise for itself.

It is worth noting that we used the SPLab exhibition space for the first part of the process; outlining, drawing etc. and later moved the work across the street and pasted it on the window. Here by we introduced a couple of rather intrinsic parts to our ‘modus operandi’ – a critique of exhibiting structures and norms, the idea of ‘a work in progress’ along with the willingness to improvise and explore alternatives when presented with preconceptions.