Fulfilment Services Ltd., D.N.A., Welcome to the Crisis

About

Welcome to the Crisis is a series of manifestos and statements in conversation with and in response to Fulfilment Services Ltd. The work appears as notes, headlines, titles and quotations that imagine an alternative reality of fulfilment based on fluidity within the natural world inspired by hydro-feminism. 

D.N.A.’s work takes the form of sound, billboards, and T-shirts. The commission is designed to circulate publicly, forcing spectators to take a step back from the networks as they know them, demanding a re-examination of the long and far-reaching effects of techno-capitalism on the environment and the day-to-day lives of the global majority. Their manifesto moves, floats, freezes, drowns and grows, creating spaces for the intersectional voices they platform. 

Centring on another perspective – a shift from a Western-centric Anthropocene worldview to one grounded in ecosystems – is of utmost importance in D.N.A.’s practice. In framing the world as one in crisis, they begin with the fact that humans are all bodies of water and bodies of resistance. This body of work calls for coexistence with nature’s systems, while resisting the power structures that try to control and extract value from our ecosystems. 

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At Fulfilment Services Ltd. we begin at the logistics of the systemised supply chain: algorithm to ‘click to buy’ to factory worker to shipping container to gig delivery driver to momentarily satisfied and fulfilled consumer; from there we link, de-link, and re-link. With Gasworks as the nexus of a series of public interventions, we invite international artists Arvid&Marie, DNA, Florence Jung, and Frank Wang Yefeng to respond to the contemporary provocation of an anti-fulfilment narrative. 

Under existing infrastructures of production and consumption, networks are constantly in multi-directional movement building new needs once existing ones have been satisfied. In an ever-expanding and dissatisfying system we ask crucially: is capitalism fulfilling consumers or are consumers fulfilling capitalism? 

The four new artist commissions situate themselves in and around London on billboards, delivery vehicles and digitally on an e-commerce platform and website. These works come together under the unified spirit of corroding existing networks of dissemination. At Fulfilment Services Ltd. our disseminated medium is very much part of our message: join us in imagining alternative realities of fulfilment by interrogating the chain of production, networks of transportation, and the extortionist quality of fabricated needs. 

Fulfilment Services Ltd. is curated by Andreanne Beguin, Zidong Chen, Sarah Daher, Zifei Ge, Hayley Gibson, Jiawei Gu and Brenna Horrox from the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme as part of the Graduate Projects 2021, Royal College of Art in partnership with Gasworks, supported by Jack Arts and Print&Digital.