New Normality. Old Habits

• plasterboard, brushes, electronics, 2020/2023

The project “New Normality. Old Habits” consists of two parts. “Come, Brushes” is a series of robotic objects made from brushes and electro-waste that move freely among the rubble; most just revolve in circles, though some can avoid obstacles, emit sounds and music – a remix of elevator music by Lecnim. The second, “Our Goal is Gross National Happiness”, is a series of sculptures made of plasterboard cut in the shape of charts which are based on studies of happiness in different parts of the world – the European Union, the United States and South America. Lecnim uses materials associated with manual labor – cleaning, construction – and technological waste to create an absurd, yet strangely familiar world in which these makeshift robots stroll through the rubble. The impression of foreignness here is intertwined with a sense of familiarity, and although the artist charts an intercontinental (yet to some extent Western) perspective, the installation seems to follow the logic of production in a semi-peripheral condition. The very title “New Normality. Old Habits” outlines the perspective of persistence, or rather survival, of certain ways of doing things, approaches to the world and to others – what can be considered cultural elements of identity, unchanged in the face of political or economic transformation. In this context, the political demand for national happiness, cut out of the plasterboard, resounds not only with absurdity, but also with an ominous, totalizing echo.