Unboxing the Future
Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2019
Unboxing the Future, 2019
Photo: Ito Tetsuo
How does automatization and artificial intelligence influence the working situation in an industrial city like Toyota? What are its effects on the human condition and what does labor mean to each one personal?
All these questions where discussed in an unusual gathering.
Factory workers and employees of the car industry in Toyota came together, to discuss their personal experiences and expectations towards the future of labor, automatization and artificial intelligence.
In addition to the discussion, imaginative utopian and dystopian aspects of the work are expressed through body movement, sound and performance.
The workers extracted movements of their daily working routines and transformed them into a collective choreography. In an act of creativity, they experimented with acoustic instruments and created a reverse process of production by dismantling working clothes. By carefully cutting of piece after piece of cloth from each other's bodies, they created a playful yet intense moment of liberation.
The work was developed in an experimental collaborative process of the artist and the participants together.
Anna WITT
- Born 1981 in Wasserburg am Inn, Germany
- Based in Vienna, Austria
Anna Witt is interested in people from a wide range of social strata, and brings these people into the performance and video installation work that she creates. Members of the community, whether that be a region or a business, and passersby appear in her video work. In Sixty Minutes Smiling, people who resemble the typical employee of the company maintained their professional smiles for 60 minutes. With Care, another of her works, the movements of those providing and receiving nursing care, in an aging region, were transformed into a group dance performance. Witt questions the meaning of human autonomy by making visible the social systems created by the logic of politics and economics, and emphasizing the movement of the human body, which carries those.
Selected Works & Awards
| 2018 | Unexpected Encounters－Artist in Residence Maebashi 2015-2018, Arts Maebashi, Gunma, Japan |
| 2018 | Human Flag (solo), Museum Belvedere 21, Vienna, Austria |
| 2010 | 6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, What is waiting out there, Berlin, Germany |
| 2008 | Manifesta7, Principle Hope, Rovereto, Italy |
Map
Toyota Citizens' Gallery
Address
Open
Admission until
15 minutes
before closing
Closed
Access
・6 minutes on foot from Shin-Toyota Station on the Aichi Loop Railway.
・5 minutes on foot from Toyotashi Bus Stop on the Meitetsu Bus.