farewell, Art

About

This research-driven project draws from the hypothesis that we will soon emphatically experience a collapse of social and cultural order due to the looming ecological degradation forged through centuries of capitalist extraction. During a two-week research trip to Scotland in March 2020, Bureau d’etudes visited and contacted organisations and communities with diverse practices and ways of making including art production, crofting, archaeology and more.

In this speculative future, aesthetic art objects and practices have shifted to more useful forms. Bureau d’etudes describes this as an ‘art of life’ which is not an art of well-made representation, but an art of  living in the ruins and an art of living, doing and imagining together. It is this renewed, reinvented art that could help reorganise social life in, through, and against the collapse; an art between humans, but also with other species. Is this art even possible, and if yes, under what socio-political conditions?  farewell, Art concerns that which awaits us in the future and that we hope for the future. 

Bureau d’études is a French conceptual art group founded in 1998 by Léonore Bonaccini and Xavier Fourt. The group has been working for the last 20 years, developing research about the structures of power and capitalism. The group lives now in the countryside and works on a 1:1 scale collective project across agriculture, commons and the re-symbolisation of research. 

Website online from 26 May: farewellart.online