An Exercise in Futility

Location: 51.485711530464826, -0.024760543612623857

Deposit: 22/06/2025 @ 16:45 - 19:45
Return: 29/06/2025 @ 10:30 - 13:30


Andrew Sunderland  /  Diane Edwards  /  Julie Maurin  /  Katya Sykes  /  Natalia Janula  /  Samuel Capps  /  Sofia Bordin

The slow tide of vampiric capitalism washes over us like sunlight hitting the skin; a blinding light that corrodes and burns, flowing from the source of empire to the sludge ridden banks, as we melt beneath its murky waters. The Thames arteries flow serving as the historic source and lifeblood of colonial commerce; Deptford, once a working class dockers and ship building neighbourhood, forms part of the ground from which grew the British Empire.

The river begs to be fed… Imperial Capitalism erodes and consumes the energy of its subjects; people, animals, materials, ecosystems… the Earth. We live in a time of compulsory obsolescence, from the shuttering of historic industries to the force feeding of garbage products, we are subjected to a decline in quality and loss of pride in producing the best, to a disposable culture where nothing is meant to last, conjuring an ongoing need for new junk to be then discarded and added to the slag pile of the defunct. A hunger for the new and the novel now agitates our bellies, new trends and fashions emerge at an unsettling speed, further accelerating the build-up of the unwanted and obsolete.

A seam between the open seas and the mega-city, where the ebb and flow of natural life in the river, and the human use of it, is in constant tidal liquidity. Canary Wharf; infested by rats throughout history, some following trails of grain from ships arriving into colonial docklands, to the present day corporate rats in their offices, nibbling on the fat of society. Consumption is intimately linked with waste, high levels of commercial and human waste are found throughout the river’s industrialised history, culminating in the Great Stink of 1858 which drove people to leave London. The Natural History Museum declared in 1957 that the Thames is “biologically dead” and cannot support natural life, to now surprisingly becoming rated one of the world's cleanest city rivers. European Eels were some of the first species to recolonise the Thames in its new clarity. In a life that mimics the transatlantic trade routes, they take three years migrating 4000 miles from birth in the Sargasso Sea to the Thames where they live for 20 years before returning across the Atlantic to re-spawn and die. There is a precarity to life in this still-fragile ecosystem that mimics London’s life on land, where people struggle to survive under pressures imposed by corporations and government with systems beyond the subject’s control.

Where once we created buildings of marvel that have stood a thousand years of history, we now face the horror of new-build blocks of flats that fall into disrepair within a few years. In the shadow of the regeneration of the dock pier, rotten and sodden timber slipways prop up the local fight against an encroaching wave of development over the last 10 years. Capitalism disintegrates the will of those at its lowest rungs of the ladder, climbing it now seems like an exercise in futility, you cannot fight this tide.

There's so much detritus, so much to break down - from the material to the psychological within this rich, festering mud lurking, the insatiable surge of human-made objects, reduced to a redundant foamy scum. Along these algaefied historic banks, work mimics the non-permanence of ephemeral consumer spoil—deteriorating, decomposing, dissolving—in the wake of the lapsed tide. A refraction of our disposable culture, actualisation to dissolution, made to be unmade, surrendering to the temporal zone; their biodegradable bodies unravel, to the point of no return, rendering defunct within the artworld commodity cycle. The industry of commodities turns auto-destructive, we create to consume, drowning in the currents of relevancy. Art, as the ultimate commodity, often drifts into obsolescence: permanently uninstalled, untouched, sealed in storage, owned but unseen. Trickling down to a rapid collapse, the city’s aorta pumps new life in a battle of instant depreciation, is this the endgame?

Make an offer! Everything must go!