Link zum Video

Link zum Video

Christin Müller

Towards a new We with the artist Luise Marchand 

Luise Marchand’s project Liquid Company – Flüssige Gesellschaft is centred around the dream of self-determination and work-life balance, which has become a potentially achievable goal in the twenty-first century. This development originates from the New Work concept, which emerged in the wake of globalisation, automation, and digitisation in the 1980s, promising freedom, autonomy, and participation. Employees’ self-fulfilment within the work environment is regarded as key, along with the reverse – a higher level of identification with their team and company. Marchand not only cast her attention on the changing world of work, she also became part of it: She created different profiles on online job portals and became a part of innovative team structures. She joined team-building events and worked in various co-working spaces. The artist recorded her activities with screenshots as well as regular and GoPro cameras, using her documentation to create the immersive installation From Me to We. 

To view the work, we must lie down on a small platform in the exhibition space to make the video play. The narrator’s voice invites us to join the onboarding for a new Employee Life Cycle. As we are listening to how we might become part of a team, we see, from the artist’s perspective, how she entered the sphere of New Work. We, as observers, are invited to follow this onboarding process in mind and body through instructions addressed directly to us – ‘breathe in, breathe out’. Another voice tells us how she is immersing herself in the new community and wants to grow with it. This ‘I’ briefly voices her doubts about these neoliberal promises, before she completely gives herself over to the ‘beautiful new world’. The installation is surrounded by five photo collages with telling titles: 

Green Detox, 

Your Company Loves You, Now; 

Flatwhite – You Matter; 

Employee of the Month, 

Brick to Go; Half Full; 

and 

Move Fast

In the images, countless smileys are grinning at us, apples and cups are branded with the slogans from the titles, and cardboard cut-outs stand in for employees. 

For this project, Luise Marchand utilises a form of providing testimony in which one’s own subjective experience acts as a filter for the documentary perspective. She transfers the role of witness to us when we physically take part in the installation. Here, the nature of the ‘documentary’ as a concept manifests itself as more than the artist’s presentation of her visual research and arguments. Indeed the most fundamental aspect of this project is the observer’s experience, which the artist guides and shapes through her incorporation of the visual and linguistic codes of New Work.