Self Capital

A video installation by Melanie Gilligan

August 2 – August 6, 11 – 5 pm, 149 Garafraxa Street South

by Tony Massett


In 2008 the global economy went into meltdown, the ramifications of which are still being felt and will continue to impact the welfare of many for years, maybe generations, to come. What precipitated the near collapse of the global economy? Was it greed plus the unregulated and unrestrained manipulation of an economic abstraction? The prevailing economic principles seemed to be couched more in the area of semantics than of sound banking practice.

Durham has felt the ripple effect from this downturn with it’s major employer, Interforest, closing and laying off its workforce.Gilligan has come at this artificial catastrophe from a unique perspective: the global economy has been anthropomorphized and represented in the embodiment of a female protagonist who goes by the surname Global Economy.

A drama in three acts

Self Capital is a video installation that distills the current global economic woes, and presents it as malaises within the psyche of a singular individual. This protagonist, the personification of macro-economics, is participating in psychotherapy to explore the nature of her economic collapse. Using this simple sophisticated device Gilligan has been able to turn a large ungraspable phenomenon into a tangible problem that can be understood in terms of a personal crisis.

The middle-aged protagonist, Global Economy, visits the therapist where she is persuaded to explore her subconscious as a means of getting to the root of the problem. The apparent mind/body split and the consequent imbalance appears to embody the dysfunction that constitutes the crisis.
The concept is quite simple in its initial manifestation and yet becomes more complex as the psychotherapy starts to unfold and Global Economy is exposed to deeper truths within her psyche.

Verbal & visual

The installation is driven by a well-honed dialogue, moving through a gamut of verbal textures and vocal projections that represent the discourse as the cast of characters negotiate their way through the therapy session of Global Economy. A commonplace dialogue becomes a visceral and sensual experience when contemplated and reiterated through the mind of our sensitive, albeit depressed, protagonist.

The dialogue is supported by a compelling visual presentation: tight, spare, pared back to its minimal essentials. There are no superfluous distractions, but rather an intense focus on the subject of Gilligan’s intent. She employs our empathy as we wander through the many entry points into her work, such as feminist politics, TV drama, or an absurdist theatre by the likes of Becket or Pinter.

There are ambiguities as the drama unfolds, with intersecting points of clarity and confrontations of confusion, where a seamless reversal of roles can maintain coherence and in no manner impede the logic of the interaction. In fact, this allows the same face to represent both sides of the same coin. And that same face is both us; the everybody and her, the economy, both vulnerable and subject to the vagaries of those who manipulate it.

Geography

The installation located at 149 Garafraxa Street, Durham’s main business area, is an empty store looking for a buyer, an appropriate setting to investigate the health of the current economic climate.

The final scene of Self Capital is set within the everyday workday world of an intimate untidy office, the occupant of which, is pondering her retirement pension. Exploring the language of retirement such as “estimate, additional, pension-age”, the normal everyday words of future fiscal security, she transforms these words as if by some intangible formulae, randomly, subtracting and adding letters to create a nonsensical hybrid derivative with no apparent meaning, a metaphor for her financial future. The implied conclusion is that future personal security appears to be a convoluted abstraction.


The camera pans out of the 6th floor open window onto the cityscape of London, England. The famous London Eye sits in the background as well as Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, the English seat of state power. The camera roams over historic architecture, solid, substantial, immobile and interspersed by the canopy of mature oaks. A staid reassuring longevity, and yet this whole frontispiece is framed within the temporary architectural motif of construction scaffolding, solid, tangible, impermanent.

The implications of scaffolding are: work in progress, care, maintenance and rebuilding, a possible reassuring restoration to the troubled Global Economy.