bottom’s just another floor

In what some have termed “too late capitalism”, we are constantly promised seamless experiences—effortless flows of information, frictionless consumption and an ever-expanding horizon of progress. Yet, instead of smoothly gliding forward, we often find ourselves trapped, spinning in place, ensnared by weird coils. The exhibition bottom’s just another floor examines this unsettling condition: an almost hallucinatory “stuckness” that rubs against the glossy finish painted by tech oligarchs, leaving us dazed within a maze. The exhibition invokes this feeling of slow-motion friction, a state of being stuck that exceeds mere inertia. It’s an eerie, yet somehow deeply stupid repetition reminiscent of the internet-conjured phenomenon of “backrooms”, where every potential escape route quietly loops back into yet another version of the same creepy, corporate non-place. An apt metaphor, perhaps, for our numerous attempts at offering seeming alternatives to contemporary power structures, with each trapdoor opening into the very same enclosure. This impasse is embodied in the sculptural work Dead End by Jakub Choma, whose installations often tackle the contradictions of our post-digital experience: the fluid circulation of images, up against the almost painfully corporeal consequences of our daily entrapment within technological networks. However, the choice between accelerating or slowing down is as paralysing as some of the offered destinations – do you prefer “Terror” or “Discontent”? “Fears” or “Regret”? As it lays bare an underlying dullness and lack of direction, “stuckness” thus reeks of failure – but it can also be a moment of stoned clarity, quickly evaporating into familiar chaos. In a similar vein, the video installation Hardly Working by the Total Refusal collective “gets stuck” on the lives of so-called NPCs, non-playable characters from the video game Red Dead Redemption. As the days pass and weather conditions change, we observe these Sisyphean inhabitants of the game world endlessly repeating the very same movements. This gaze, aimed at what the average player passes unnoticed, slowly reveals the cracks in the illusion of the Western town—a hammer driving a digital nail into thin air, a broom failing to sweep clean the dusty road. The pointlessness of these repetitive, peripheral activities, resembling a radical version of Graeber’s “bullshit jobs”, elicits unexpected sympathy for the fates of secondary characters set against the backdrop of a violent story of the roots of the American dream, which has perhaps never seemed more artificial. The absurd mutations of masculine ideals and related forms of disciplinary control are addressed with (literal) playfulness in a series of works by Anne de Vries, whose practice often explores the dissolution of established meanings and values in a post-digital mud fight over the dominant narrative. The dynamics of this struggle fuel the “raid” of the SWAT unit’s action figures on the lion’s paw – a heraldic symbol of medieval knighthood. This symbol appears repeatedly in Anne de Vries‘ work, often on the feet of De Wachter, a wandering knight who has long lost his place in the power structures of the present and whose figure adorns, apart from the TV news cycle in the STAMP ALERT – Connecting The Dots video, also the headquarters of the Dutch secret service in Zoetermeer. The paw itself is symptomatically malleable: sometimes it looms over us in larger-than-life proportions (PUBLIC DISPLAY), other times it lies down to sleep in a kids bed (SAFE SPACE – Choco Relief and SAFE SPACE – Tickle Play) or swells until it fills the whole room, as in one of the banners from the series Tomorrow’s Dream, Today’s Haunt, which subversively appropriates the material and aesthetics of the corporate futurism of architectural visualisations. The disturbing way the SWAT team straddles the line between a child’s toy and grown men – fusing together childish playfulness, erotic compulsion and police brutality – paints an ironic portrait of contemporary power regressing to a kind of accelerated Freudian “anal stage,” accentuated in the loud splattering of chocolate syrup from the video Play Time is Over. If, until now, we have been straying from the path, stumbling upon dead ends and making strange twists and turns, Tomi Faison’s videoinstallation Autonomous Drive (Hell For Leather) traps us right in the middle of a surreal, immersive scenario: on the seat of a car slowly driving through a burning landscape. The author, whose eyes gaze at us from the rearview mirror, shows no signs of hesitation in the face of flaming disaster—digital, but also environmental and, on many levels, social. As she looks back, she calmly heads straight into the depths of the inferno. Philosopher Thomas Nail understands our present political and economic system as a state of being “stuck” in one pattern of motion and wielding it violently against the rest of the world. The exhibition concurs with Nail’s thesis: “I am not saying that Western civilization is unnatural to have gotten stuck and forced others to as well. Illness is just as natural as health”. With all the present talk about the coming changes in the global world order of the past few decades, which increasingly seem to simulate a return to centuries-old economic and political traditionalism, Nail’s assertion of stuckness in a single power pattern seems all the more pertinent. We do want to get “unstuck”, eventually. If we are to end up anywhere but in flames, a change of pattern is inevitable. But instead of charting yet another flashy speculative escape, bottom’s just another floor stays with the friction of stuckness, focusing on obscure tensions and corruptive contradictions beneath the speeding surface. You are invited to enter the loop, where every step may lead back to the start, and where we wager that what we thought was rock bottom might just be another floor...