Video performance with Hans Christian van Nijkerk, produced at Nida Art Colony, Nida, Lithuania (January 2018)
"Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work."
-Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
The video is presented as a series of exercises to "fill your existential void" – suggestions of how to engage with nature.
The artists are both dressed in minimalist black, do not speak and have a serious expression through the entire video, sitting on their knees on the floor of a white cube space. The visual aesthetic and musical cues bring to mind the Western trend of mindfulness, meditation and related practices, while the exercises themselves range from the poetic to the absurd. The video -uploaded to Youtube in the company of many other instructional videos- is tagged in a way to signify the origin and purpose of the exercises: boredom. Tags such as "meaningfulness", "be bored, not stimulated", "embracing boredom" and "non-entertainment movement" suggest the work can be read as an act of resistance against the neoliberalist impetus to be productive, never be lazy and never be bored.
