730 hours of Violence was a self-commissioned project, funded through MediaFutures and the EU fund Horizon 2020, where we wanted to represent and physicalize the different forms of violence that exist and evolve in our modern society, taking the shape of new paradigms and ideas that aren’t yet as visible, but ever-present and affecting our everyday.
The exhibition is presided over by a counter that marks the hours that remain until the exhibition ends. The project will end when the clock, which started at 730 hours, reaches 0. It begins in a room that symbolizes violence as it is usually understood: bombs, weapons and blood. More often than not, definitions of the term speak of punches, bruises and interpersonal conflicts. The first piece raises the question: Who has to define what violence is?
From there, the exhibition explores several forms of violence beyond the interpersonal: Slow Violence, a concept developed by Rob Nixon, integrated into environmental catastrophes that develop slowly due to pollution or climate change; online hate speech and cyberbullying; Glass Frontiers, the invisible borders that prevent people from exercising their basic rights within a city; Data violence and the biases programmers leave in algorithms; and selfie dysmorphia, the body image disorder reflecting the need to edit the digital image itself.
The tour ends with three sculptures on intangible violence: hostile architecture on the streets of Barcelona; Byung-Chul Han and Sarah Ahmed’s idea of the violence of happiness; and violence by omission, which indicates that by ignoring violence, we perpetuate systemic structures of oppression.
The exhibition took the visitor through various rooms and works, each addressing a different form of violence, with the goal of prompting a reimagining and redefining of a concept we think we know all too well. Across the show, each form of violence was translated into its own physical or interactive language:
A loop machine printed a collective collage of public-submitted images of violence; an autopsy of a fatberg with 100 jars and a video-tour of London’s sewers; three hammers wearing down the gallery wall, each striking every time someone sends a tweet using one of the three most common words in online hate speech; four panes of glass protruding from a mountain of sand to mark Barcelona’s economic, educational, housing and health borders; security cameras paired with a classification algorithm that judges visitors randomly; a journey through 6 filters contrasting the perfectly instagrammable self with the brutally honest one; five chairs redesigned to be useless alongside a video tour of 160 examples of hostile architecture in Barcelona; a symbolic “Choose Happiness” contract written on the wall; and a bed whose blanket is stamped with silhouettes visualising the 540 evictions that occur each month in Barcelona.
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