DEPRESSION ERA

For the main exhibition of the Biennale the Depression Era has installed a group project inside a room of 8×9 metres, forming a common thesis about our place and time. When in a constant and deep crisis, people
lose mainly two things: their sustenance –work, food,capital, basic resources– but also their visibility – the possibility for their story to exist and be heard or seen by others. Depression Era makes some of these
lost stories visible and heard again, presenting them to the public in a new web of stories: a mosaic of images, video and texts taking us past the age of happy endings. The installation features works of the
members of Depression Era and projects produced through the collective’s year-long collaboration with young artists in a series of artistic workshops.
The project has no beginning, middle, or end. It creates intersections and continuous entanglements on the room’s vertical and horizontal surfaces, against a digital live image feed by members of the collective, running for the entire duration of the Biennale – a constant, autonomous flow without pause or turning back. The installation is organized around a rotating square-within-a-square. The ensuing discontinuity creates a paradox, filled by accumulation, correlations and sequential voids. Different points and modules align with either of the two squares, on the bays or protrusions created by the rotation. Our collective project remains in a constant state of becoming, its readings changing along the different tracks of the audience. The project’s points and modules collide,
unite or set themselves apart as they encounter the Biennale’s constituent states, between the optimism of the will and the pessimism of the intellect.