- Venue
- South London Gallery
- Location
Camera scans a well-lit, brightly coloured interior of (just another) Mc Donald’s. Everything seam perfectly in order – food waiting on the tables, machines behind the counter working. Except there is nobody there, no staff or customers at sight. And then the water starts coming in.
Editing switches between the close ups of the interior details (happy meal figurines, burgers lined up on a shell and juice dripping from a machine) and the slow but certain flood of water filling the room and swallowing chairs, a children stool, a mascot-clown (evoking Stephen King’s It), picture of the employee of the month framed up the wall.
There is no escape, the water washing down full trays, filling the rubbish bins, making registers disappear, plastic and food floating on the surface. When the yellow neon sign turns down and the water takes over the entire space there is nothing left but organic matter disintegrating, the final underwater cut to an abstract image of sunken paper cups and plastic wrappings. The end.
After which we are left wandering have we just witnessed an imagined documentary of a supposed ecological disaster or an experiment in phenomenological perception? Either way, the latest film by Danish Superflex: Flooded Mc Donald’s, on view with South London Gallery from January 16 – March 1, ticks boxes for both critique of transnational consumerism and visual intensity of space metamorphoses.
There is something of Bill Viola’s Love / Death: The Tristan Project (as showed at the former St. Olaves College in 2006) feel to the impressive size of the screen set up at the Gallery and while the whole experience lingers a step from indulging in a Titanic-like spectacle, the main impression of Babylonian symbolism unrolling for us in live action remains dominant.
It is the second production for the Copenhagen-based artist collective, their debut film Burning Car (2008) released in 2008. This time, they travelled to Bangkok, Thailand to set up the life-size replica of the interior just to film its deconstruction. The shorts are continuation of the fifteen years of practice they have in staging art projects tagged as “tools” in critically engaging against the existing social and economic reality.
