Das Kapital—Epilogue

A Fable about the End of an Era

Amman, JO
2020

The Demolition

We came along a property that revealed nothing but a few ruins. It was noticeable as a gap in a continuous line of family townhouses. The entire house was gone, and nothing but a rusty fence with a gate indicated the property. Mohammed took a picture, and later I noticed that his photograph stored many details that already slipped off my memory.
The gate was held by a loose cable hanging from the wall of the neighboring building. The cable might be a former power line that once connected all buildings in the street until the chain got interrupted. I started to ask myself what happened, how did the building get lost. The place had the strange aura of a modern ruin that got outpaced by its future obsolescence.

 

The Context
At that time—it was fall 2019, no trace of SARS-CoV-2 and its effect on the global political economy—I was studying recent discourses in social theory projecting possible post-capitalist futures that range from the utopia of fully automated luxury communism over a digital update of the socialist calculation debate (E. Morozov) towards more humble conceptions as Bruno Kern’s version of eco-socialism, keeping in mind the physical restriction of economic growths or varying speculations of a post-growth society.
Very insightful speculations as such yet all these ideas are missing the attempt to be historically substantiated within a global social theory. It felt as if the common knowledge of the so-called “Global North” did not offer the right concept to assemble all these different ideas. Zhao Tingyang’s tianxia-theory based on Dao principles that describe a utopian human understanding based on the fact of its total inclusion in the world are not enough appropriated by young Western thinkers to merge their idea in a common cause.

 

The Story
At this time, the demolished house made me understand a lot about modern subjectivity and its chance to make it into an open future. We recorded a series of interviews and noticed that all neighbors who knew about what happened to the building told us the same plot yet with emphasizing different details.
One night the landlord dreamed of the deceased father who told her that an ancient treasure would have been buried underneath the building. A short time after she had the dream she went to action. She evicted the tenants on the first floor, hired a company, and started digging through the cellar.
Although she found nothing her ambitions didn’t slow down. Quite the contrary. She consulted construction engineers, evacuated the building, and tore it down. Later—according to some version of the story—public agents and even members of the government got involved. However, the alleged treasure never got found and in the meantime, the construction law got amended and did not grant permission to re-erect the building. The house was gone.

 

What’s the Message?

In the light of the discourses about alternative future and post-capitalist societies, I realized that this story has a strong moral account. Not only for the allegory that the landlord’s creed made her lose what she had similar to unnecessary consumption and exploitation of the planet that is destroying the global environment and thus the resource of life on this planet.
The good moral of the story is rather that she was ready to give up her property. She did it for the wrong cause—no question about that. Yet she did it, she showed the ability to give up her comfort to make a change.
This quality rather relates to humanity than to capitalist thinking, and if it is still active in modern subjects we might be not only the problem but also the solution for the future.

3-Dimensional Timebased

Media
Multimedia installation with found object, video and sound,
rocks, steel and wood

Dimension
Dimensions variable

Duration
(12“07‘)

Exhibitions
Nos douleurs montées sur un soleil comme sur un cheval de course, Centre Bhir Lahjaar, Jaou Tunis 2024 – Contemporary Art Biennial, 7th Edition
Sous la terre, les dragons, FRAC Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France
MO_Schaufenster #34: Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Museum Ostwall, Dortmund, Germany
A Matter of Resilience, Darat al Funun, Amman, Jordan

Collections
FRAC Pays de la Loire
The Khaled Shoman Collection

Location
Madhhar Reslan 8, Amman, JO

 

Links
Art Dubai Feature

Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Das Kapital - Epilogue, 2020_Video Still.

Video
Courtesy of the Khaled Shoman Foundation, FRAC Pays de le Loire, and the artist