International Festival
of Computer Arts

Off the Shelf. Post-Consumerist Imageries When the Business Left the Building.

Event

Off the Shelf. Post-Consumerist Imageries When the Business Left the Building.

  • 30th MFRU
  • Exhibition

18. 10. 2024 – 27. 10. 2024

Location: Velika kavarna

Off the Shelf. Post-Consumerist Imageries When the Business Left the Building.

This year’s edition of MFRU, the International Festival of Computer Arts, titled Off the Shelf. Post-Consumerist Imageries When the Business Left the Building, explores the positioning of digital and media art towards sustainable and social forms of living economies and the commerce of goods.

Observing the global polycrisis and the growing discussions about abandoning capitalist logic raise the question of what this future would look like and how we could achieve it. Instead of looking for pre-packaged solutions, the festival calls for unconventional thinking, experimental settings and community-centered processes while imagining how a post-consumerist world could be structured and how it could function.

The festival program combines economies, ecologies and intermedia discourse by focusing on fundamental areas, such as real estate and urban regeneration, nourishment and basic needs, fashion and beauty, technologies and entertainment, but also nostalgia and rituals, and generally critiquing a lifestyle linked to individual wealth. The invited artistic positions reflect on these dimensions proposing works that take a critical stance on common value systems and at the same time exploit their contradictions in order to develop visions and tools for a social life that is not centred merely on consumption.

Off the Shelf explores viable alternatives for low-impact, regenerative and community-oriented projects and, in the context of the climate emergency, contributes to envisioning a radical reorganisation of society.

Curated by Davide Bevilacqua and Lara Mejač.