LoveArt is pleased to present the fifth iteration of our nano project space, Love[f]Art (out of isolation but grounded here) with Sydney based collaborative duo Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro’s poignantly titled Don’t Shit where you Eat. Drawing inspiration from the 1974 Surrealist comedy Phantom of Liberty by Luis Buñuel and Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th Century Decameron, Healy & Cordeiro ruminate on social cues, conditions and consequences of pandemic induced isolation.
Don’t Shit where you Eat
DSWYE is a common enough aphorism. Vaguely speaking it requests the listener not to cause trouble within situations that effect one’s life position. The phrase has been interpreted within a range of meanings from ‘Treat the earth with kindness’ to ‘Don’t have a romantic entanglement in the workplace.’
The idea of an office romance during the work from home era of Covid isolation is laughable. An illicit affair with one’s spouse sounds like a comedic episode from the Decameron. Yet it may be Boccaccio’s 14th century plague-era tale that best teaches us about our own pandemic circumstance. Broadly speaking, the Decameron was an expression of the masses’ loss of faith in the church due to its ineffectiveness against the ravages of the Black Death. Will there also be a similar post-pandemic loss of faith in the institutions of our contemporary age?
The digital concertinaing of work life and home life has thrust our industrial-age routines back into a cottage industry existence: toiling away at home with children under foot, while #BLM and the #MeToo movements have rattled the hegemony of White Patriarchy.
What will be the long-term effects of this virus? Right now, there is a possible branch of a future reality that takes the iconoclastic lessons of the Covid era and forms a socially and ecologically sustainable framework to live within. Our ability to change and adapt to our circumstances is proof that we have what it takes to face the challenges of our age. The world has gone topsy turvy but we are still standing (just).
It is with this spirit that we question current social mores: A half-eaten takeaway pizza lies abandoned in a bathroom. This vision creates a schism in our mind like a scene from Luis Buñuel’s 1974 Phantom of Liberty in which a party of guests sit upon individual toilets while chatting around a table, meanwhile down the hallway, a man furtively dines inside a concealed closet. Something breaks within our mind, and we wonder ‘what the hell am I doing?’
The stress and strangeness of this pandemic-age just might cause us to snap out of our collective Stockholm syndrome and finally admit that the Emperor is in a state of undress….
