Incorporated! – Les Ateliers de Rennes – Biennale d'art contemporain (2 vol.)

How are we to give shape to emotions in a world that seems to only try to monetize them? How are we to show the tensions which result from our incorporation in the abstractions and systems controlled by the economic world?
“Inc.,” standing for incorporated, is the suffix which, in economic jargon, describes the transformation of a proper name into a company. Otherwise put, the inclusion of an individual identity within a system in which it is incorporated. Whether watchword or password, “Incorporated!” is the intentionally ambivalent term which encapsulates our prolonged inclusion within ideologies and technologies governed by the economy.
Incorporated!, the 5th edition of contemporary art biennale Les Ateliers de Rennes, proposes to pay heed to the affects caused by this incorporation. The exhibition attempts to capture what is today passing through bodies, identities, feelings, and relations, in particular doing away with the boundaries between the private and the public, the singular and the shared, work and life. The “infinite mobilization” of capitalism has exaggerated the intensification of lives, to the point of bringing to the fore, as Tristan Garcia writes, “a new moral type: electrified man.” This contemporary model sheds light on the way in which bodies, products and affects are today circulating in a closed loop, in which their identities are interchangeable. The person whom we thought was a consumer of the economy turns out to be a producer, not to say raw material, in an economy where the essential value no longer resides in the production of goods but in grabbing attention and capitalizing affects. The paradoxical commands of the economy, the endless debt, are producing a precarious existence, shared beyond notions of labour and unemployment with feelings of powerlessness, abandonment, and dispossession, which are their corollaries. It is in this highly-charged context that modifications of ways of feeling, and new ways of connecting to and disconnecting from one another are produced, where, in spite of everything, there is still the desire to be incorporated.