Tere Chad – In My Dreams
IN MY DREAMS: ‘La memoria è ridondante: ripete I segni perché la città cominci a esistere – Memory is redundant: repeats signs so the city begins to exist.’ (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972). The current pandemic and thus the consecutive lockdowns, not only appear like a health issue but also exposes the impact of social media and the post-truth in the way politics are configured. The Situationist International had already warned in the ’60s about how media was influencing in what they called ‘the Society of the Spectacle’. Guy Debord described ‘the Spectacle’ as the dissociation between reality and representation or an image that captures reality. Social media creates a virtual interface that may fulfil our desires allowing us to disconnect from reality. In this digital construction, we seem to dissociate and forget our natural environment that struggles to overcome Climate Change. In a world that unavoidably shifts to the digital realm, Tere Chad reflects on how artistic practices can remind us of how important is to feel the world through the sense of touch in order to reconnect with our suffering Earth.
‘Today, our perceptive apparatus itself is incapable of arriving to any conclusion: it just clicks its way through the endless, digital net. Our senses are completely distracted.’ (Byung Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and the new technologies of power, 2017). Tere Chad’s first solo exhibition in a commercial gallery, presents a body of work (from which some have been done during lockdown), that in a both naïve an ironic tone with recurrent circus elements, portray our sensationalist society. Her practice characterised by its versatility as its attempts to unveil an overstimulated society. The excess of digital stimuli sometimes limits us to see the bigger picture and what is really important in life. The artworks showcase a series of surreal figures that playfully remind us of this pandemic that almost feels like the dream we never wanted to have. A dream we were escaping from, but that inevitably made us stop and realise that we cannot keep on living at the accelerated speed we were living before.
