REAL, Experiment on collective life rhythms (2)

REAL, Experiment on collective life rhythms (2)Performance/video, 7:00 min, 2010

http://vimeo.com/14084932

“Actualitas Kunst vor Ort,10 Artists in Braunschweig’s world of consumption”. 18.‐21. May 2010, Performance Festival.On the May 20th, 2010 four actors paid 10 euros worth of supermarket items with coins valued at 1 cent upto 50 cents at the supermarket Real inBraunschweig.The aim of the action was to stop the flow of traffic in the lines and record the behaviour of the cashiers and the people waiting in line.Some of them stressed, some of them resigned, and some of them offered to pay themselves, in order speed up the process. In the performance,money, which is conceived to accelerate commercial exchanges, ends up causing the payment process to even go slower and stop the normalflowing of operations.The antropologue Marc Augé has defined the anthropological “no‐places” (supermarkets long with shopping‐malls, hotel chains, airports) as acategory of places, mostly with commercial aims, where people are often inserted into mechanisms, characterised by standardised behaviourswhich they have learned.The supermarket is a specific place which is part of a bigger system, and influences our everyday life and its rhythms, and definetlydefines them.