For the show Something Out Of It, the first chapter of LIAF 2022 – the biennial of the Lofoten archipelago in Norway – held in Venice in April 2022, the space I was dealing with was the private residence of two collectors. I had been thinking for some time about the violence of domesticity and architecture, about the meaning of the word “safe” and the home as an apparatus of class struggle. I came across the news from Philadelphia almost accidentally, and it seemed to me a fundamental starting point for the work: certainly, the trap is a visible and concrete object of violence, but it is equally true that the institutionalized violence of dispossession, gentrification, finance capital, and the housing market is a far more reticular, complex, and brutal trap.

Not really. The desperate times in which we live are far more complicated than that. In the book, The Reality Overload, the writer Annie Le Brun reminds us how the actual deforestation and desertification of the planet also corresponds to a desertification of thought. Capitalism’s extractive opus goes far beyond the physical world; it also affects time, the subconscious, imagination, and desire. Resisting this progressive personal and collective deforestation requires the production of alternative “machines”, that is, compositions of bodies, objects, and thoughts capable of sabotaging the extractive process. The title of the work alludes to the saying “desperate times call for desperate measures” and is, in a way, strangely optimistic: it is an invitation to imagine countermeasures and alternative technologies for the creation of the self and the world around us.

Working on traps has allowed me to find an “oblique” entry point to deal with historically established practices such as architecture and sculpture, which have well-defined parameters. By changing these parameters even slightly (removing a door from a room turns it into a prison), it seems clear how the trap ontologically originates much of the cultural production. According to the anthropologist Alfred Gell, traps – as well as art objects – are akin to machines, automatons that embody the intentions of the hunter/artist and, at the same time, mimic the environment and behaviours of the victim/spectator/inhabitant, turning them into their own paradoxical and lethal doppelgänger. Although I disagree with some of Gell’s modernist positions, I find that this idea of a trap world opens up interesting scenarios to work with.

They’re ghosts.