Standards of Living is a multimedia work that investigates the relationships between the desire for comfort and the forms of living in neoliberal society. The work highlights how our “standards of living” are reduced to surrogates for the utopia of contemporary comfort, with the aim of satisfying the global commodification of living. Standards of Living compares the authentic appeal of parquet flooring with replicas made of synthetic composite materials and adhesive laminates, which proliferate in the housing market today due to their more affordable costs. They are, these, printed images, the result of a single photograph of wood replicated, potentially, endlessly.
If architectural design suggests certain quality standards - the wood floor as an image of high home comfort - the photography of faux parquet floors denies its inherent property of being a “document” to produce, instead, fictions: synthetic surrogates of millions of pixels. The desire for comfort is thus satisfied no longer by the real object, but by an image that evokes it. A status destined to remain imperfect, however, because it is incapable of replacing the original. Parquet is thus transformed into an expedient to produce an imaginary sound surface of a flooring showroom, where the desire for comfort and safety is challenged.
Standards of Living is the sonic epilogue to a trilogy of performances dedicated to the themes of Work and the relationship between human beings and the man-made space, made between 2017 and 2019: Dominare Spiritualmente il Progresso, Buchi nell’acqua, and Lo Scherzo. Recorded between 2021 and 2022 between Milan, Luxembourg, and Naples, Standards of Living takes its title from a verse excerpted from Roxy Music’s In Every Dream Home a Heartache, a verse that is recited in the first track of the record Show-room Intro by Lauren Wetmore’s voice.
In reference to the photographic theme from which much of the research stems, the record ends with a tribute to the guitar arpeggio and lyrics from Def Leppard’s Photograph recited by Alberte Agerskov: I see your face every time I dream, On every page, every magazine, So wild and free, so far from me, You’re all I want, my fantasy, Photograph, I don’t want your Photograph, I don’t need your Photograph, All I’ve got is a photograph, But it’s not enough. Through loops of arpeggios and guitar solos, a Roland Alpha Juno II synth, small incursions of obsessive rhythms, Standards of Living is a record that deconstructs the aesthetic and sound of a certain AOR (Adult Oriented Rock).
