'We DO talk about Bruno'
The Life Balance Sheet
A business declares bankruptcy when its losses outweigh its gains, with no hope of future recovery it will end its operations and cease to exist. This same concept has been bought into the life of modern mankind where we constantly feel the need to asses our assets and liabilities to deem our life either a success or failure. We are so deeply alienated from our own lives that we somehow attempt to quantify each aspect of it. Measuring ourselves as if we are commodities whose value is only in reaching a certain social status or monetary wealth. We convince ourselves that our lives value arises out of our socioeconomic position and we appear as objects whose worth can be quantified. When one doesn’t reach these goals as it is mathematically impossible for the majority of us all to we feel immense failure to ourselves and the people around us. As the business goes under, often we feel our life is not worth living anymore. We internalise our ‘failure’ and are told we only have ourselves to blame for the position we are in, with no regard for the confines of the system we live in.
Life cannot be quantified, our relationships to the people and matter around us cannot be simply measured. The attempt to do so completely abstracts us from our actual existence in this world. The logic of a profit maximising enterprise should not be applied to mankind and we should reject with great confidence the commodified view of life.
This project was inspired by Erich Fromm’s 1955 book, The Sane Society. It appears more relevant now than ever before, truly ahead of its time. I can only imagine what Fromm would say of our world now. My good friend and colleague at my workplace gifted me this book, thank you Bruno!
Screenprint
Southbank 310gsm
20 x 25cm
