'Symmetrical Floundering' by Inside Job at Cantina, Aarhus

I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants - a body.
- William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch


I can feel the fever closing in. Rain dropping on the heated steel plate - part of the factory’s conveyor belt system - vanished with a hiss into a steaming cloud. The twin vaulted arches of the collapsed roof, growing dark from the fire, pointed up into the leaden sky. Like clenching fingers or claws - as if some giant hand wanted to grasp the whole charred area.

To shake hands with ashes.

(To flounder is to circulate) ...so I circulate between symmetrical layers of seemingly contradictory phenomena. Blind maswerks, gables, vesica piscis, fish bladders. Artifacts from circumstantial trial, that is - fabricated evidence of the lost futures and all those persistently sweating gnarls suggesting the breathing processes of emergent technology.

And I again squint at the metal surfaces - the red-hot steel. This imprints within each landscape - ru- ins of bygone eras and extinct paradigms. Greyed out curtains and night vision eye - hidden infrared illuminator - survival against the very darkness squeezing through the cracks of walls. Mechanical gargoyles, post-anthropocene gothic, pyrocene. The upcoming and the very last flame. It only needs one look to slam steel shutters of continuity.

A replicating bestiary of forms traverses the times. It bulges in the places I look. It bends and lures me away. Ornamental floral motifs/ lost garden. Clumps of weeds protrude from between the scorched earth. Thistles mingle with creeping cables. Aluminum spills across the floor from too much heat.

In the distance, from between the trees untouched by the fire, a dog looks at me - an ordinary mongrel.

- Inside Job 

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Artistic objects, unlike architectural ruins and other remnants of existence, have the significant ability not only to ”evoke the truth of the past, but also have the power to predict the future.”1 [...] Through their works the artistic duo Inside Job explores, contests and looks far into the processes of identity production, the mechanisms of transition between dia- metrically opposed spheres of existence, the sense of community and the discovery of a metaphysical perspective. Each of the presented pieces is at least two-dimensional, each while observed from one side reveals the presence and conceals the character of the other. Aggressive shapes, dark textures, and the cold sheen of polished metal are attributes of horror. Fear is not out of place here. It’s a scene where emerging energy gives hope for reconciling reality with the mirror-like hereafter, hope for a new spiritual order - lunar, secular, horizontal, multiple and dynamic.

- Jakub Bąk 

1 Susan Schuppli, The Architecture of Public Truthfulness, 2021