The Pirate Machine
2016

The work takes shape as a make-shift shelter, or clubhouse, for the gathering of a small group of visitors, friends or strangers. Constructed out of wood and cardboard, the structure provides space for hanging out together, and for viewing a video work of the artist undertaking a banal and steady action: laying out blankets onto the floor of his studio, the artist grabs whatever objects, trash and items he can find, placing them one at a time onto the blankets. The objects begin to form a strange, or rather dissident collection, maybe even a museum capturing or suggesting what the artist calls the “lowliest matters of capital output”. The video integrates a voice-over scripted and spoken by the artist, a voice that speaks of loneliness and migration, of making do and stealing, and of the possibilities found in territories of the night and the periphery that lend to formations of unlikely community.

The work speaks towards questions of dispossession, and the complex precarity and tenacity of what AbdouMaliq Simone terms “improvised lives”.

As part of the group show, The Imaginary Republic, Tag Team Studios, Bergen / September 9 – 18th, 2016