All over the world, citizenship – the right to belong somewhere – is tied to specific nations. But what if technology could allow a more liquid citizenship beyond national borders? New Eelam, by Christopher Kulendran Thomas (b. 1979, London), is a long-term artwork in the form of a startup – a real-estate technology company founded by the artist to develop a flexible, global housing subscription that aims to make homes as streamable as music or movies. Based on collective co-ownership rather than private property, it aims to rewire property relations through the luxury of communalism rather than of individual ownership.
Charting an alternative trajectory from one of the darkest chapters of the recent history of globalization, New Eelam envisions a distributed alternative to the ancient Tamil homeland of Eelam which was wiped out with the brutal end of Sri Lanka’s civil war in 2009. So what could a new Eelam be if it was reimagined as a distributed network rather than a territorially bounded nation?
Thomas’s practice works through the structural operations of art, through its production, circulation, and distributive processes. When Platitudes Become Form (2013–ongoing) features original artworks by some of Sri Lanka’s foremost young contemporary artists, purchased in the island’s current “peacetime” economic boom and then reconfigured for international circulation within Thomas’s compositions.
Operating initially through contemporary art’s transnational networks, and through its role in prototyping new lifestyle formats, New Eelam imagines the future of citizenship in an age of technologically accelerated dislocation, asking how a corporation could be constituted as a state and how a brand might communicate as an artist. New Eelam’s presentation for GB11 at the Asia Culture Center introduces this post-capitalist venture and speculates on how a new economic system could evolve without friction out of the current one. MW
And this: www.amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Future-Postcapitalism-World-Without/dp/1784780960
And I think this thing that I participated in is gonna be really great (once they get the website working, which they will have done by the time you publish this): http://www.planes.sx
This just made me cry: transgenderlawcenter.org
http://transgenderlawcenter.org/archives/12893
Especially from about 6 minutes in.
But a conversation that has been super important for my thinking this year is actually a recurring debate with Maria about what “radical” means. I might expand on that in June if there's time then to add something before you go to print.
In the meantime, I'll leave you with this (which will certainly be part of my argument if I get time to make it): itunes.apple.com
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/1989/id907242701
And, if you need any actual bio info, then exhibitions include: Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making 1789–2013 at Tate Liverpool, Co-Workers at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Bread and Roses at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and The Present in Drag, the 9th Berlin Biennale.
