‘Ancient Workers’ by Ca­therine Bi­occa at Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen

This Spring the con­crete fortress morphs be­tween a com­pa­ny’s of­fice and a dis­in­te­grating mar­riage, an arche­o­log­ical trea­sure and a spooky tomb, a fu­ture fac­tory and a fallen multi­na­tional. With an­i­ma­tion, image, sculp­ture, graphics, jew­elry and play, Berlin-based Catherine Biocca (Italy, 1984) trans­forms the Kunstfort into a col­orful dystopia: An­cient Workers.

The main plea of this ex­hi­bi­tion is to work harder. In the en­trance room we en­counter a rest­less CEO trying to mo­ti­vate everyone around him, si­mul­ta­ne­ously in dif­ferent lo­ca­tions, sec­tions and times. And back­stage is even more dis­turbing: from the CEO’s inner mo­ti­va­tion rep­re­sented by some an­cient statue mixed with a Homer Simpson-like char­acter, to a hor­ri­fying jew­elry set talking to us from a screen. Em­ploying vi­sual ref­er­ences and nar­ra­tives from sci­ence fic­tion, Biocca re­flects on Fort bij Vijfhuizen as an ar­ti­fi­cial place where date and des­tiny seem con­fused.