DISCUSSION: Double Bind

In Double Bind, artist and curator behind @freeze_magazine Cem A. brings together two people from different professional fields to answer the same questions without hearing each other’s responses. Noise-isolating headphones interrupt the exchange, leaving the audience to discover connections and contradictions between their accounts. As they speak, a real-time linguistic analysis of both testimonies maps where their vocabularies converge and diverge, projecting the results behind the speakers and providing additional data through a companion website.

For Unsound, the subject is collapse: the upheavals that swept across the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BC, and the prospect of contemporary capitalism coming apart. Late Bronze Age societies were connected through trade and diplomacy, raising an uneasy question for our own globalised world: can soft power hold an international order together when its entanglement with capital erodes the legitimacy and cooperation it depends on?

Archaeologist and self-described collapsologist Guy D. Middleton joins sociologist and economist Monika Kostera for a conversation moderated by curator and art critic Arkadiusz Półtorak. Across more than three millennia, their parallel responses will show how societies organise themselves, unravel and imagine what comes next.