20.000 multicolored balls, 190 pages and an answering machine massage compose the hieroglyphic structure of International Festival’s new work presented in the group show Toys R’ Us at Brändström & Stene Gallery in Stockholm. Opening 10 April 17.00 (10 April – 13 May).

“-We have been working with confetti for quite some time now, and felt that it was time to upgrade. Those IKEA Kindergarten balls made our day. Confetti with muscle, or perhaps a shift of gears from party-stimmung to Freud’s oceanic – those balls are after all called ocean balls. Still, we are not interested in party or ocean as representation but in a blurring, a diffusion of the horizon. It is a matter of losing orientation and to engage the viewer in a process of producing orientation. This moment, however short, implies a departure from reason, from thought and from aesthetic observation: this is a moment of pure experience.”

The loosely connected parts form a narrative that takes its starting point in the gallery as a site for labor. The proposal can be understood as a site specific as it is set up in the office and implicate the staff, in three different modes. International Festival: Sherlock Holmes and His Friends in fact has no smaller ambitions than to revolutionize how individuals interact in the office.

To fall in love in the office is conventionally understood as trouble. Deep trouble. Company executives spend hours, days and weeks – they even come together for international conferences – in order to resolve their employees’ terrible habits of romancing, falling in love, fondling and making out in the office. The fact is of course that they spend these precious hours engaging in others’ possible sensual activities as a substitute for their own lack of adventurous excursions in the office. Disguised by arguments of efficiency abnormal amounts of resources are spent on prohibiting emotions and activities that every sensible individual consider healthy and wonderful. This book, instead of offering methods of coming in terms with undesirable behavior, present an open set of arguments for the importance of an increase, a veritable explosion, of stormy office romances and all kind of kinky actions in the workplace. It is time that we get rid of restrictive patriarchal models for what is considered proper attitudes in the office and start loving. This publication insists on celebrating romantic and sensual endeavors in the office.

With the development of industrialized society offices and workplaces has been subject to numerous models of organizing efficiency. The once popular cubicle was to be replaced by office landscapes. The surveillance opportunity of the corner office, and the closed door, was substituted by an assumed openness of the lateralized office, where curved desks-tops designs and five-wheel chairs made it impossible to communicate. Important issues concerning hierarchy, gender, age-groups, ethnicity etc. were considered possible to reconfigure though more or less strong architectural implements. But wasn’t it all gestures whose actual purpose was to maintain asymmetries of power and decision-making, when all that was needed was to engage in differentiated modes of performance at our workplace. Romance, when activated through care and honesty, offer a top notch, an outstanding, strategy to dissolve all kinds of dusty, uptight office policies. It is after all quite fun to unbutton the pants, or slide up the skirt and jump on top of the copy machine.

We are all familiar with the group photography taken of the staff when the office succeeded with a difficult, i.e. economically prosperous, project. There we stand dressed up slightly, with arms around each other, smiling tightly before going home to sleep for a few days, or taking care of our ignored loved ones. There seems to be something wrong in this behavior? Isn’t it during the process, during the hard days of work that we should put our arms around each other; kiss and hug in the boardroom, kitchenette and why not make out in the middle of the office. Why should we engage in terrible processes just in order for that picture to end up framed in the boss’ office?

Within post-fordist production conventional compartmentalization of the workforce necessarily lose its efficiency. The individual is no longer defined by single lined job-descriptions but through complex and shifting engagements in specific kinds of information machines. The contemporary workplace is no longer organized through uniform lines or routine practices, instead it presents a high level of unpredictability. It is precisely the ability to maneuver among abstract and interchangeable opportunities that constitute professional quality. The information machine is an introduction to successive and opportunistic elaboration. Opportunism gains in value as an indispensable resource whenever a concrete labor process is permeated by diffuse communicative actions. Instrumental action, defining fordist production, has been exchanged for caring, sensual, loving and intimate relationships with the possible.
Post-fordist production implies a difficulty in measuring the staff member. A colleague that bubbles with creative energy and positive atmosphere can be extremely valuable for the well being of the workplace or office even though he or she is spending more time producing good moods than scoring deals or troubleshooting software. Affective production has become a central characteristic for a contemporary office. The continuously interchanging abstract information machine, our contemporary working environment, is hence not a context that the staff member can, or should, produce identity in relationship to, but instead, in order to optimize the offices opportunity, a milieu that is productive of individuated experiences. It is precisely the process of individuation that guarantees an experimental and progressive climate in the office. To prohibit romantic, sensual, loving and generous exchange between the staff member, in other words, is one straight high-way to an uninventive and regressive production. Post-fordist production at its best is a context of progressive falling in love.

This is the moment when the CEO starts murmuring something about how romance can turn sour, and loving gazes can transform into flashes of hate and anger. We can just remind them about how the traditional definition of opportunism synonymous with swerving from one to another, being available to the greater number, has been exchanged for an opportunism generated by curiosity and care.

Romance, sensuality and love in the context of office operate as agency for creative actions that does not simply break or obey to rules (simultaneously affirming them in the act of transgression), but are actions that changes the grammatical system itself, operating in, and on, a space or situation where the grammatical rules can not be distinguished from the event.

To propose a different articulation of alternative frames for engagement at work, in the office, implies new modes of subjectification, which are both political and existential. Frames that shift perspectives from defensive tendencies of structural allocation to benevolent heterogeneous allocation in dynamic resources, are ones that emphasize opportunities for a multitude of new modes of subjectification, that through equity apply to every engaged subject or community, independent of hierarchical positions.

Romance, sensuality and love enables each of us in a process of individuation to contest traits of distribution, accountability and authorization in general, to intentionally perform a creative action understood as an exodus from sovereign frames.

The ambitions of this book thus is to praise what forces us to escape good will, consensual thought, and instead insist on bad will, which fundamental concern is to examine the reliability of claim, in favour of an open speculative operability that empowers us to venture all the way along the question that gave power to oblige us to think: how to produce incoherence where coherence rules.

Ladies and Gentlemen let’s romance, let’s fall in love and do it as stormy and wild as possible. It is time to change the protocol and engage in the kaleidoscopic and eruptive sensual, romantic, sexual opportunities of the office.