Conceived in the aftermath of the pandemic, Measuring Life: Notes Toward an Impossible Exchange features a series of invocations (performances, screenings, interventions, etc.) that interrogate systems of value embedded in hegemonic representations of life and the economy. We look at the 'anthropomorphisation' of the economy in public discourse-the construction of the economy as organic matter- versus the constitution of life itself as a computable object, its reduction to a financial problem, or a la Mbembe, the ways in which life and matter are incorporated into “systems of abstraction and "machine reasoning".” Addressing the question of what value stands for, the project unravels the violent workings of dominant systems of representation, seeking to imagine new modes of measuring that bring into being a different aesthetics and a radical praxis affirming the powers of life.
Read the full statement here.
Interventions by: Bassem Saad, Sami Khatib, Nadim Choufi, Ali Hussein Al-adawy, Bahar Noorizadeh, Hussein El-Hajj and Harun Farocki.
With: Firas Shehadeh and Reem Marji.
https://online.daratalfunun.org/projects/measuringlife_en/
This project was realized at Darat al Funun- The Khalid Shoman Foundation in 2020.