Concept for the «Weight of a Fly’s Legs» Project
The modern world is obsessed with hyper-productivity. You learn to work; you work to eat; you eat to have the energy to work. You cannot slow down—you will collapse immediately. Life lived in the grip of time scarcity and deadlines leads to a paradox: by trying to control everything, people lose their sense of life and understanding of their own goals.The cult of efficiency traps us in rigid frameworks of schedules and everyday standards. I offer an alternative—the right to slow down and engage in what seems useless. This is a legitimate way to find the hidden gaps in the system and protect personal boundaries.Because I work with the theme of inefficiency, my book features artists who have compiled totally pointless instructions, and in my videos, I strip everyday objects of their pragmatic function while remaining in bed.
I want to translate a sweeping manifesto against capitalism into an intimate, pocket-sized format of «unhelpful advice» for the weary person.
Concept for the Book by Artist Ves Lapok Mukhi
My project offers the right to slow down, and in the artist’s books, this idea transforms into a practical guide to useless actions. They feature absurd instructions—for example, cooking individual grains of rice or capturing the weight of fly legs on the skin. These tasks have no utilitarian purpose; they cannot be monetized. They exist to disrupt the automatism of daily life and grant the individual the right to control their time without regard for utility.The instructions are distributed across two books.
The first form consists of strips where the paint is absent, and the text is applied using embossing. To read it, the viewer must slow down, change the angle of the strip, catch the side light, and scrutinize the shadows. Thus, the reading process loses its automatism and becomes maximally conscious.
The second form is a long book—so long that it can only be turned slowly. To create the book, I randomly splatter ink across the pages and then write the text over the resulting points.
Video Concept: The Weight of a Fly’s Legs
In my project, I am exploring a departure from the pursuit of efficiency. In the video, this idea evolves into a radical inertia. To capture this state, I chose a passive recording method—I film it without leaving my bed.
The video captures the edge of a curtain, cracks in the radiator, floating dust motes, and fibers on a blanket in extreme close-up, deconstructing the image into blurred, grainy spots. The visuals are complemented by the rustling sound I recorded while running my hand over the bedding. This video offers no discernible outcome—only a focused gaze into microscopic processes.
