”Recession – time of my life"

2019 

Performance installation at Finnish parliament house, 2009

In collaboration with Eero Yli-Vakkuri and assisted by Armen Levon

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Recession, time of my life was born out of being tired of opposing the impossible and the sunny side of the unexpected recession. 

 

I had been involved in the anti-capitalist movement in the early 2000’s and influenced by the pan-european movement, which in the end didn’t seem to have much effect. When the Lehman Brothers investment bank fell and pushed on a financial Tsunami, I was deeply concerned on how the financial system had become a platform of gameplay, that only some profited of but all suffered from the consequences. 

 

At the same I was tired of opposing and inspired by the British artists easygoing attitude towards heavy issues. I found that if I wanted to participate in making a change as an artist, I can’t do it with aggression. 

 

The idea for the installation came with watching the submerging stock market curves, that seemed like a joyride, a slide that leads us somewhere good. Point being that sustainability is hard to reach by agreements; best is to let the economy crash and lower consuming in a generic manner. 

 

The installation was made in collaboration with a dear colleague Eero Yli-Vakkuri. He had been working with different ideas around capitalism critique and we had therefor a common ground for our first collaborative piece.  

During the one-day event people go to slide the slide and participate in finding solutions for a more sustainable economical system. 

 

Writing this at the time of Covid 19-crisis, many of the motives and fears around the 2008 crisis re-arise. The restrictions that were made after the Eurocrisis to ensure bank sector stability and prevention of creating overly complex market instruments is history and we are again in the point zero.  We are right now facing a historical crisis, not due to Corona, but the cumulative effect in which money is “printed” like never seen before. 

 

Even a simple artist knows, that there will be consequences: a hyper-inflation, widening the gap between the poor and the rich  (due to the printed money flowing into the stock market and inflating only the values at the stock, which eventually will also create value changes/ inflation in other markets), crash of the moneytary system etc.   There might be a need for a “Recession time of my life 2020 version.”