Silvia Martes

The Revolutions That Did (Not) Happen

18 Sept - 28 Nov 2021

Body parts hung from a clothesline, mannequins that come to life and human teeth as currency: the Silvia Martes film The Revolutions That Did (Not) Happen (2021), which will premiere in the project space WOOL, quickly gives rise to a sense of the uncanny. But with her unpredictable science-fiction tales reminiscent of Roald Dahl, Martes keeps us riveted to the image.

Martes (Eindhoven, 1985), who currently works as a resident artist at the Rijksakademie, usually makes short films in which alienating events derive their credibility from film sets that she herself has meticulously designed. Her most recent film takes place in the year 2085. She suggests an age in which political and social structures have collapsed as a result of wars, pandemics and natural disasters. The new society to be developed is one of equality, one where women of color – in line with the artist’s own skin color – work in all levels of its hierarchy. But it is also one that bears an unpleasant number of similarities to a totalitarian state: here everyone has swapped their identities for grey suits, and people cannot be distinguished from robots. Martes has taken inspiration from the way in which, through the influence of the Internet and social media, we have all begun to resemble each other, while – paradoxically enough – individuality is rewarded. The film is thus full of ambiguities about the necessity and meaning of change, mass behavior, individuality and the cost of the work ethic. Matters that continue to occupy us even after the film is over. By fantasizing about the future, Martes exposes above all the shortcomings of the present.