ZAYNE ARMSTRONG
The Factory
multimedia installation
Welcome to The Factory, where fitness meets fantasy in the captivating world of Days! 💖Meet Victoria, the visionary manager with a secret to sculpt more than just bodies. As Nuran and Phillip, the dynamic personal trainers, shape more than muscles, a familiar face emerges from the shadows: Charli is at the center of it all, embracing The Factory's allure while harboring an own hidden agenda. Marvel at the cutting-edge fitness technology, where FitWatches become deadly devices, tracking more than just heart rates. In a world of sleek gluten-based devices, every step takes you closer to success, or into a web of lies. Welcome to The Factory, where scandals sweat, and every step on the treadmill takes you closer to the edge. Coming soon to Days – because your path to a healthier, fitter you is about to get a whole lot juicier. Are you ready to beat your Personal Best! 🌟 #FitnessFantasy #SculptYourself #FactoryFitPath
#FitBitch 🏆
The fitness studio, in one light, is a space that turns the paradigm of paid labor on its head. Imagine individuals paying for an aerobics class, which, unbeknownst to them, entails performing the physical labor of a moving company. In this scenario, paying clients find themselves engaged in the task of moving someone else's boxes up five flights of stairs, ultimately resulting in the moving company profiting doubly from their efforts. Despite the inherent irony in this arrangement, it is doubtful that individuals would be dissuaded from paying for such a class. Similarly, we accept that our identity and person has become a commodity traded in a highly capitalist market—no one likes Meta but we still use it.
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The Factory presents three bodies of work, with the first being a 30-minute long animation film. This film follows Charli, an aspiring journalist on a quest to ‘follow the money’. The narrative takes an unexpected turn when Charli, after witnessing a fitness tracker watch explode, shifts the article focus from lover Philipp's failed handball career to a more sensational story, investigating who might stand to profit from this incident. The stories that are portrayed in the various iterations of Days, engage in the complex reflective process of auto-fiction. Many of the stories are collaboratively written, based on the lives of the people involved in making the project, if not with the person performing the character––and here Charli’s on-screen life is easily paralleled with the life of the actress playing her, Andrea Birmingham.
The character Charli was first introduced in the pilot episode of Days (2022), and in Charli & the Factory, Aasgaard and Armstrong work with many of the same cast members to represent the characters in the Days universe. In addition to Charli being played by Birmingham, Victoria is played by Meri Koivisto, Nan by Popo Fan. Inspired by the aesthetics of Grand Theft Auto and The Sims, together with the animator Esteban Riviera, the animation process has employed many AI plug-ins to ‘efficiently’ translate images of these actors into their avatars for the film, brought to life by motion capture videos for lip syncing, body and hand movement. The animation process has brought Aasgaard and Armstrong’s work closer to one of the main themes of the story in the film: the role of technology in the dynamics of neoliberal labor; or in the skewed words of Charli & The Factory’s villain Victoria: “We don’t want to walk up a hill, we want to have walked up that hill; we don’t want to see poor people we want to be seen seeing poor people. But now human will power can be replaced by technology”. The implied question being: is this already the case now? And do we want this?
This auto-fiction also applies to Aasgaard and Armstrong’s formulation of setting or ‘place’. Days rethinks the soap opera trope of Hollywood’s anywhere any time existence––Days of Our Lives is set in a fictional city of Salem, that over its’ 50+ year run has been thought to be in a number of different North American regions––into a specific place: Berlin, a space that is not only familiar to Aasgaard and Armstrong, but which is also a city that has been significantly growing during a period of millennial fixation on personal freedom in the labor market: “I want to be able to work anywhere, anytime”. Berlin’s mythology is complex; as the very nature of mythology is subjective, there is no singular absolute Berlin, and as it is a real place it is constantly transforming, and perhaps augmenting its own mythology. Many of the conceptions of Berlin are based on past versions of the city that are now long gone (West or East Berlin while the wall was up, the forgotten cheap Berlin of the 90’s, etc.) or are inspired visions that have no basis in reality. What could Berlin be? The project Days looks at real Berlin as a place where Aasgaard and Armstrong are setting their scenes, but also as a heterotopia to interpret, to satirize, and to use as a starting place for inventing, to engage in the process of world building traditions local not only to soap operas but also to Sci-Fi and fantasy; what could Berlin be? Can one build a new mythology for Berlin?
Aasgaard and Armstrong take realism as an aesthetic tradition. Realist literature includes poetry for example, where the ‘poetic’ form is the most accurate, efficient and direct mode of representing reality. Charli’s story unfolds within painted environments––edited versions of Scenes from the life of Saint Bertin and the Annunciation to Mary with prophets and evangelists (Simon Marmion, 1459), The Flagellation of Christ (Ugolino di Nerio, 1325), Job Story: Job in the Sickbed (Pseudo Bartolomeo di Giovanni, 1476 - 1500), The Annunciation (Piero del Pollaiuolo, 1480) and Interior with a Jacket on a Chair (Cornelis Bisschop, 1660), The Pantry (unknown painter, possibly Gerrit Dou, 1650-1660) and Woman at a Window (Caspar David Freidrich, 1822) ––collaged together with imagery from ‘real’ locations in Berlin, as well as a gingerbread house. The script satirizes a number of real elements in Berlin—for instance, the Vivantes am Urban hospital is called ‘DeadAunties’, and the news magazine Der Spiegel is called ‘Der Spargel’ (the asparagus), in an attempt to create a realist representation of the city and the impulses of the characters who populate its landscape. While Aasgaard and Armstrong work within the sphere of the real place of Berlin and its specific mythologies, they see the city as paradigmatic of the global north’s movements and conflicts: is it possible to opt out of blindly buying into ideologies that have always been an individualist marketing strategy?
Episodic TV has been given a counterpart in the film industry: the franchise, a form that is epitomized by the superhero worlds of DC Comics and Marvel universes, as well as the Lucas Media’s Star Wars, all of which create other-worldly casts of characters; alien, robot and plant-beings interact with a spectrum of humanoid beings. This broad, inclusive social landscape is an extreme of how Aasgaard and Armstrong model their Days world fitness studio The Factory, where characters go to reinvent themselves. The second body of work in The Factory presents a series of figurative paintings of characters from the media franchise Transformers taking so-called ‘progress selfies’ in mirrors set within late gothic architecture collaged from the two-part painting Scenes from the life of Saint Bertin and the Annunciation to Mary with prophets and evangelists by Simon Marmion 1459), today hanging at the Berlin museum Gemäldegalerie. Aasgaard and Armstrong’s painting series reflect on Foucault's idea of the heterotopia, which is a place within a place, a small world that affects the world around it. The wikipedia entry uses an image of a public toilet: separated from the outside world, yet smelly. Other examples are prisons, ships, bars, cemeteries, fairs, etc., all spaces which are other or somehow disturbing, intense, incompatible with or contradictory to the world around them. These spaces are transformative; they reflect yet upset the world around them. As Walter Russell Mead has written, "Utopia is a place where everything is good; dystopia is a place where everything is bad; heterotopia is where things are different — that is, a collection whose members have few or no intelligible connections with one another." Foucault links the ideas of utopias and heterotopias using the example of a mirror. A mirror is a utopia because the image reflected is a 'placeless place', an unreal virtual place that allows one to examine oneself in an environment, but within a frame; the mirror is also a heterotopia, in that it is a real object. The heterotopia of the mirror is at once absolutely real, relating with the real space surrounding it, and absolutely unreal, creating a virtual image. In our history of images, representations of mirrors pose a kind of problem. IKEA uses a gray gradient. Cartoons often use diagonal streaks of blue. Manet’s barmaid painting (A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882) shows the mirror’s reflection as a kind of skewed backdrop behind his subject, and models the painter as a guest at the bar, rendering the painting an unstable object both real and unreal.
These paintings are a new development in Aasgaard and Armstrong’s painting practices, which usually takes to painting as a part of scenography, where objects or images help to construct a fictional space wherein to stage drama––the ‘fine art’ counterpart to this could be trompe-l'œil, where the viewer of the artwork is tricked into believing the fiction. As much of Aasgaard and Armstrong’s work is built around the idea of drama for Days, it also is built around the audience: The large ‘mirror’ paintings position the audience in the place of the Transformer characters––these nod at body dysmorphia, the machine trying to improve itself, the rupture between reflection and reality, the drive to optimize ourselves to increase our own market value.
Aasgaard and Armstrong draw on the aesthetics of late-gothic painting like they do with 90’s soap opera: going backwards, while also suggesting an alternative development. In the Middle Ages in Europe, most people lived in so-called feudal societies where the richest people actually owned the workers around them. This can in every way be seen as a horror scenario in today's free democracies born out of the Renaissance idea of human self-worth. What is less well known about the Middle Ages, however, is that it was also a time of a high degree of unionization and cooperation among the working class. As Silvia Federici points out in Caliban and the Witch, the average worker has never – before or since – had such relatively good working conditions as at the end of the Middle Ages (the Gothic period). The reason for this was not only the general shortage of labor in the wake of the Black Death, which gave workers a good basis for negotiation, but also the strong unionization between the guilds. The Factory collages the labor paradigms of the late medieval era with contemporary fitness culture. The project expands on themes local to the Days project from the beginning: what out-moded models of labor from the past can we learn from? While both the form of soap opera and the medieval guild system for craftspeople are highly problematic, these also model modes of solidarity and collaboration that are lacking in the landscape of the contemporary profit-driven culture class.
The third body of work in The Factory is a series of fan-powered sculptures which inhabit the exhibition space. These draw from the figurative sculptures by the British modernist sculptor Henry Moore. Moore's approach to figuration feels often more about what’s inside a person, what space a person occupies and how heavy loss is, how much a human life costs. More directly these human-ish forms can be read as post-human, cyborgs or bodies that defy modern body norms. In contrast to Moores’ reclining figures, Aasgaard and Armstrong’s figurative sculptures are made from digital textile prints of ‘sculpture materials’ and rely on an electric fan for their perpetual movement, oscillating between deflation and inflation. They reflect on contemporary labor politics where terms like freedom and flexibility are presented as advantages despite leaving workers in increasingly precarious and vulnerable positions. Satirizing this, the inflatables are tethered to a power source, to which anyone could pull the plug at any moment.
Charli & The Factory, Buskerud Kunstsenter, Drammen (NO)
Images by Øystein Thorvaldsen
Bronzed, brassed and coppered. Sundy, London (UK)
Images and videos by Liam Tickner186 x 70 x 65 cm
Printed ripstop fabric figure, black electrical fan
78 x 200 x 58 cm
Printed ripstop fabric figure, steel electrical fan
120 x 140 x 58 cm
Printed taffeta fabric figure, steel electrical fan
Zum schönen Knie I, DoomSpa, Berlin (DE)
Images by Roseline Rannoch and Ink AgopPrinted ripstop fabric figure, black electrical fan
Printed ripstop fabric figure, black electrical fan
Zum schönen Knie II, DoomSpa, Berlin (DE)
Images by Ink Agop and Marlene Zoë Burz203 x 160 x 4 cm
Carved MDF, acrylic paint, hardware
24.01.-03.03.2024
SOLO SHOW: The Factory
Buskerud Kunstsenter, Drammen (NO)
23.07.-13.08.2022
SOLO SHOW: Bronzed, brassed and coppered.
Sundy, London (UK)
22.09-30.09.2022
GROUP SHOW: Zum schönen Knie II
DoomSpa, Berlin (DE)
curated by Roseline Rannoch
21.06.-26.06.2022
GROUP SHOW: Zum schönen Knie I
DoomSpa, Berlin (DE)
curated by Roseline Rannoch