All that is solid melts into movement

Almost 200 years ago, the stability of society and culture were seen to be dissolving under our feet. Marx’s famous phrase, “All that is solid melts into air” poetically described a world transforming into an uncontrollable collection of wills and desires. Our contention is that the dissolution of society—that has led to the Anthropocene, the new geological era—is less a “melting” than a movement from vertical hierarchies of power to horizontal distributions of access. Today, there is no stable connection of ideas to structures. The experience is one of constant movement and uncertainty of the strength of the social fabric. This exhibition will examine how, despite constant movement, common ground can be found. Through the way ideas affect our lived experience, we will focus on the destabilized pillars of meaning and the measure and shifting value. All that is solid melts into movement uses the basic conditions of horizontal and vertical / stasis and movement to explore how the unexpected movement of solid, immoveable things affects the way we orient ourselves and make judgements about our shared world. We will produce segments of moving footpath and sidewalk, and a section of wall that move. These moveable structures will be activated by ourselves and audiences accompanied by the artists. The performative and installed elements will be augmented and amplified by a series of video works that show documents of the artists using walls in a dance of constant adaptation, negotiation and meditation on the world up on wheels.