I love to you. Workers Voices from the U.A.E.

Overview

Our very first work together was already our last. Or to put it as Deleuze may have preferred it, we started right in the middle. That work spelled out concerns that would haunt us in whatever work we would subsequently undertake together. And the task would be a monumental one. We aptly titled that work Dencity, fusing the words density and city. We hoped to call out to ourselves the task at hand: to look, listen to, recover, (re)present, and in some sense stay vigilant to the dense, vertiginous city – the city which is ever-changing, ever-elusive, reappearing and disappearing in a kind of dance between competing forces.

Our approach to studying the city and those disparate forces was, one could say, materialist in orientation. We physically explored, experienced, looked at and listened to the city. As much as we were concerned with the discourses enveloping it, we felt the need to confront those discursive sites with physical and material developments, locations, and manifestations. The ambition was to have the city stand in for itself, the manifest city, in its everydayness, everyday shifts, slips, hiccups, tremors, stalls, orderings, and movements. For each question, there was a voice, a sound, a time and a part of the city that would offer us insight. All the while we began also to accrue a vocabulary for working together, for moving through spaces, for describing what we were seeing, for orienting our conversations with one another and with our public. The terms spanned psychological, economic, and social motivations and effects, including words like amnesia, blithe, corrosion, corruption, desire, exile-aration, flight, fear, neglect, oblivion, emigration, immigration, hope, memory, greed, gentrification, speculation, development and redevelopment, renewal, renovation, regeneration, resonance, property, power, silence, nostalgia, nyctalopia, speed, tremors, pollution, picnolepsy, private and public “good”, Brooklyn, Manhattan, BQE/LIE, Torino, Eindhoven- Rotterdam, Berlin, London, North Adams, Budapest, Columbus, Newcastle-Gateshead. These are the physical terrains e-Xplo has covered in our short but intensive history together. But as has been our habit, we have always been attuned to the density of information and material that we are co-habiting with and co-exploring together.


This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 8.