In the video trilogy PLU 123 Alice May Williams takes us for a dip between various song drenched islands of collective identities, whose borders are drawn through shared colours and language, gestures and genres, geographies and jobs. As we are tugged from side to side between conflicting loyalties the linguistic and signifying borders between "us" and "them" become ever more slippery and we are left wondering who 'we' might be.
MoreUtopia!
In Without Nature MoreUtopia! re-stage a conversation with the great grandfather of conceptual art, Gustav Metzger, who ideologically proposes the kind of roles artists might play in saving the 'natural' world.
Throughout the natural world we see genetic mutation strategies evolve to accommodate altered ecologies. Variegated plants imitate illness to evade predators. The Peppered Moth becomes blacker to camouflage with smog-infused tree bark. As the natural shifts, humanity in turn evolves new architectures to inhabit the world.
If we have already ruined Nature, how do we go on with an acceptance of our full implication within ecology, that there is now no distinction between 'Nature' and 'us'? Artists create propaganda. We grow our own tomatoes, design teapots, and the provisional becomes an emblem for the regenerative. Survival and utility aesthetics pervade as we strip back to makeshift finishes. We build from materials that assume that ‘the catastrophe has already happened’.
