The drive to collapse
Olalla Gómez Valdericeda & Ramón Mateos
from February 28, 2025 to April 26, 2025
Capitalism rules, perverts, sustains the wealth of a few and tramples on those who nurture it from the bottom up. It is an individualistic and border-creating system: expelling or using the others does not matter if it contributes to one's own benefit. Capitalism expresses itself at the macro level in the functioning of the global superpowers, as well as at the micro level; in smaller economies and through the fulfilment of personal desire. It is an ever-evolving machinery through which subjects self-exploit and enslave inferior ones. Production and destruction go hand in hand in a process that, according to philosopher Byung-Chul Han, has to do with the Freudian idea of the death drive, that consubstantial tendency of living beings to return to an inert state, which manifests itself as vital anguish and destructive impulse. Capitalism's ruse, explains the Korean thinker, consists in orienting these aggressive forces towards economic growth, in order not only to forget the unconscious fear of death, but also to believe that we can overcome it.
“The more violence you exert, the more powerful you feel. Accumulate killing power produces a feeling of growth, force, power - of invulnerability and immortality (...). Killing protects against death. By killing, you arrest death. An increase in killing power means a reduction in death".
Byung-Chul Han. Capitalism and death drive. Polity Press 2022.
Olalla G. Valdericeda and Ramón Mateos tackle the current perverse capitalist scenario and its consequences without anaesthesia. Through a series of multidisciplinary works, they criticise the Western system and the violent accumulation imposed by the law of the strongest. Accumulation of materialities (curtains, figures, coins...) generates a tension that seems to be heading towards an end or drastic change; however, this never comes: the unjust socio-political reality is perpetuated over and over again. How long will the ascending inertia that places us on the brink of collapse last? The answer is not very encouraging, the repetition of the past certifies that we are incapable of learning from it.
Nerea Ubieto
