Comfort Zone & Disillusion
Presented by Onomatopee in collaboration with The Royal College of Arts Critical Writing in Arts and Design programme, ‘Comfort Zone’ is a Group Exhibition of Nest 2011, talk and launch of Onomatopee’s NEST 2011 box-set.
Where comfortable experiences usher our lives beyond comfort zones.
Onomatopee Projects presents Eindhoven’s top design and art talents and reflects on currents in their practice in collaboration with the RCA’s Critical Writing in Art and Design course.
24–26 February
Talk, launch and opening: Friday 24 February, 8pm
25–26 February 12–6pm
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At So Far The Future, Onomatopee stages a group exhibition of the 2011 series entitled Comfort Zone & Disillusion and launches the box-set with the 4 publications plus a textual compendium — in collaboration with the Royal College of Art’s Critical Writing in Art and Design course — which deepens this year’s theme using the artists variables and beyond. The Nest 2011 “unsolicited advisers” are DIY event stylists heyheyhey, surreal architect Willem Claassen, hedonistic ecologist Nacho Cabonell and bottom-up urban-carthographer Jozua Zaagman.
Our age is characterised by the cumulative establishment of “comfort zones” in which we feel at home. We surround ourselves with objects like furniture and various accessories, with social events such as festivals, high teas, or visits to cinema that suits our disposition: that enable us to “get away from it all” and offer “a necessary time to relax”, to be with each other or “to live the family domestics”. This comfort zone is the cultural denominator for a very narrow understanding of what is private, both in a mental as a spatial perspective.
In recent decades the idea of the “wellbeing” has become strongly embedded in our cultural expectation: we now simply expect increasingly good healthcare, spare time, holidays and trips, domestic luxury and so on. This expectation used to commensurate with increased purchasing power. Meanwhile, the Wall collapsed and the free market became free for the world at large, making the rich West’s competitive position, an illusion. Despite the warning of the credit crisis, a culture of greed has remained submerged within the ashes. There is increasing support for a policy that the leftist desire for mercy and the right’s desire to reduce taxes unifies: a policy that effectively feeds off all of its own excesses…
Cultural and economic innovation stems precisely from progressive attitudes: from progressive qualities of “innovative thinking”. Effectively this means that we, you and I, should overcome our primal urge to “the comfortable”. We need to dare to acknowledge our assumed reality as an illusion and dare to experience this illusion. The disposition of disillusion, the ability to rethink and reposition your desires and character, are pious positions in a spoiled culture.
With:
heyheyhey
Willem Claassen
Nacho Carbonell
Jozua Zaagman
Featuring textual reflections by:
Arie Altena, Michiel Huijben, Freek Lomme, Andreas Müller, Julie Taraska, Marco Tobasso, Gerben Willers, Ellen Zoete.
And contributions of students of the London Royal College of Art’s Critical Writing in Art & Design course: John Dummett, Peter Maxwell and David Morris.
Curator / managing director / chief editor: Freek Lomme
Project manager/ final editor: Ellen Zoete
Assistance: Maartje van der Schoot
Graphic design: Raw Color
Made possible thanks to: BKKC/province of Noord-Brabant and Municipality of Eindhoven
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