No Gambling

To live is to accept a certain degree of risk. The act of gambling or instant decision making brings us in intimate relation with time. As an act, risk lets chance take hold. It opens us to uncertain futures and shifts our constructions of the past. In No Gambling left over utensils from gaming culture such as dice, playing cards or billiard balls serve as transitional objects to play with notions of repetition, addiction, desire and morality. As transitional figures, Frank may appear as a chimera, Nele a life-size dice and Simone as joker. Each in their own distinct way, making unreal appearances and disappearances as they perform every-day magic with the collection of things within reach. A mobile structure hangs in the room like a strange cosmos of space junk. Similar to those that hang over children’s beds and offer a floating collection of things to observe. Casually named a ‘mobile for adults’ this antigravitational structure expresses a fragile interdependency. Playing with the mobile becomes a creative destruction as things bound to one another fall out of balance and risk collapse. Despite the precarity, the figures respond to an incessant beat which brings them into a trance like dance and sends all things spinning like a roulette table or the planets themselves. Sound glitches offer the possibility of genre shifts and time-lapses. A glitch, understood as error, may offer a radical shift in the ecology of things the protagonists gamble with. The question remains hanging – what are the stakes? When the ice melts, when the sand is redistributed, or when all the melon is eaten up, what are we still playing with?