Liverpool, 2015.
The time is ripe for sabotage and refusal. A city that professionally doubles for New York and Chicago, selling an American dream for celluloid; a tried and tested exercise in being just convincing enough. Use this slippage, and learn from this masquerade. As social structures begin to crumble, what are your tactics? What will you become next – the hermit or the magician? With the card of Judgement, landing reversed, you can return at last to Justice, who presided over the site of your specific goal with a certain, boring mystery. Judgement sits askew in the place of The Questioner, that is you, and suggests that judgement and the fear of it, is simply not your bag. You yearn, perhaps, to get beyond value, and value judgements. The Sun announces in his bald way that this is eminently possible, and the climate positive for your intent.
On Coping: A Reading for Liverpool is a project by Auto Italia in collaboration with Lauren Barnes and The Royal Standard, bringing together artists from around the world to create a shared space for exchange and support. Part residency, part research, and part public programme – the project takes its starting point from the emotional alliances and collective strategies that enable our artistic work to take place in the face of increasingly unforgiving social and economic pressures.
It’s time to work together and find new strategies. What can we learn through empathy, prophecies, tarot and speculation? What systems are available to us to hijack and redirect value? As the elite closes in, let’s create our own spaces for autonomy and creative production. From 17-19 July, collaborating artists shared ideas and proposals through workshops, performances, discussion groups, works in progress and more, alongside a display of installed work until 2 August.
