OPENING: January 9th, 8 pm
The Scarred Transporter (TST) is
a work-in-progress, interdisciplinary, collaborative project which aims to
explore the idea of technological utopia and how it affects the landscape and
our behaviour as consumers. To do so, we focus our research on motor
vehicles of all versions and purposes. We present the automobile as a source of
endless emotions and experiences, a “perfectly scarred” machine which
incarnates the technological utopia of its time and confirms the supremacy of a
global socioeconomic model. As it can be seen, we search for and
photograph shabby, useless, scrapped vehicles in order to highlight their
built-in obsolescence quality, a widely used strategy in
contemporary market economies which promises ephemeral well-being and serves
the purpose of creating new needs by constantly putting pressure on individuals
and altering the landscape.
Nonetheless, it is hard to think that in a
context of severe crisis, built-in obsolescence can be a desirable or even
sustainable strategy. Rather, it seems more appropriate to sometimes go back to
the old repair-reuse-and-recycle strategy applied to obsolete items, including
technology. The economic uncertainty many countries have been facing in the
past few years, along with the misery that for decades has plagued vast areas
of the world, demand from all of us a more responsible use of technology and more
ethical production and consumption practices.