"Our Life In The Shadows" by Tania Franco Klein
This series is influenced by ideas about the pursuit of the American Dream in the Western world, leisure, consumption, media overstimulation, eternal youth, and the psychological results that these ideas generate in our lives. The project seeks to evoke a mood of isolation, desperation, vanishing and anxiety, through fragmented images that exist both as fiction and reality.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han says we live in an era of exhaustion and fatigue, caused by an incessant compulsion to perform; that we have left behind the immunological era, and are now in the neuronal era, where illness is characterised by neuropsychiatric diseases such as depression, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, burnout syndrome and bipolar disorder.
My characters find themselves almost anonymous, melting into places, vanishing into them, constantly looking for any possibility of escape. They find themselves alone, desperate and exhausted, constantly walking the line between trying hard and feeling defeated.