For more than a decade, Femke Herregraven has been investigating which material base, geographies, and value systems are carved out by financial technologies and infrastructures. The exhibition 'Dialect' marks the last chapter of Femke Herregraven's Creator Doctus trajectory at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie/Sandberg Instituut.
Focusing on the effects of abstract value systems on landscapes, ecosystems, historiography, and individual lives, Femke Herregravens research is the basis for the conception of speculative characters, stories, objects, sculptures, sound, and mixed-media installations. Her interest in finance stems from the fact that finance and art started operating in similar ways in the late 1960s/early 1970s. During that time, the dematerialisation of money, gradually untethered to gold reserves, coincided with the dematerialisation of the art object, through new artistic practices of conceptual art. The return of language in her work comes from the premise that language itself is increasingly shaped by the dynamics of capital and technology rather than by the dynamics of imagination.
In a financialised world, language is increasingly being defined by its economic exchangeability. How to break away from the increasingly informational and transactional use of language under the widespread and dominant systems of finance? How can breathing, vocalisation, and noise resist the grammar of capitalism and break its monopoly on the future? By staging a live vocalisation learning experiment, the exhibition DIALECT explores strategies for reactivation of the imaginative force of language against the claim that finance has on the future through the semantics of capital.
Femke Herregraven transforms RADIUS into a site for language re-signification that is reciprocally informed by the local ecology in which it exists, hence vocalising its own dialect. Empowering semiotic agency against an increasingly unstable future, DIALECT emphasises the ecological embeddedness of language and mobilises its polyphonic potential to be able to wish for and shape futures beyond capitalism.
More info: radius-cca.org & research.rietveldsandberg.nl