HOMO:LI//PROGRAMACION-OBSOLETA
04.10.2025 - 02.11.2025, OFFSPACE 345
With the work homo:li//programacion-obsoleta Studio Fumo are bridging the realities of overconsumption of energy that is provided by batteries and their crucial component lithium in Switzerland, and the realities of lithium production abroad. The industry causes erasure of peoples and land in the so-called Lithium Triangle between Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. The absence of attention towards the scooters gathered at the bridge for the exhibition’s opening reveals a new reality. A reality of moving through a space that is covered with these machines, laying awkwardly on the sides of our pavements. The battery, as a symbol of responsible green living, is apparently all but sustainable or ecologically friendly. Vast volumes of water are needed to extract lithium, but the reserves are mostly located in drought-prone regions, which leaves the people living in those regions forcibly displaced. Yet the rhetoric around the transition to electric mobility stays unchanged or even becomes more ramped up in the urge to move to fully electric vehicles. Even their own obsolescence is artificially sped up, programmed, and predestined by the producers to boost the demand. The extraction itself is rushed, accelerated, all neo-, but colonial.
The unsettling absurdity of this rhetoric is translated through the video collage that the passers-by can see from the bridge. The duo produced this video during their residency in Argentina. “Technodictatura” becomes the neon-green thread that weaves through the piece. Images of Elon Musk and Javier Milei announcing their friendship, Difunta Correa’s shrines surrounded by empty water bottles in search of divination, the caricature of the homo:li — the lithium man — driving through the desert, an endlessly rotating hoverboard, glitching, rushing through the screen. These images arrive in Switzerland, which is championing e-waste production in Europe, and here, shocking numbers of lithium production companies are residing. Acceleration, greenwashing, extraction, and bizarreness are all coming through the work of Studio Fumo for 345 off.space.
TEXT: OLGA POPOVA
