Immobile Ascent is a moving photograph of futile progress. A body on a descending escalator, trapped in motion without advance. Stillness within movement, exhaustion without purpose—the absurdity of a world that demands more but leads nowhere.
The society of the 21st century is a society of performance, where humans, transformed into autistic self-exploiting machines, move relentlessly without ever advancing. In this performance, a person climbs an escalator for an hour, going down, and staying in the same spot. Occasionally, they move out of the frame to evoke the illusion of freedom in a system that forces adaptation, to underline the absurdity of conforming to a system that demands continuous movement but offers no direction.
The work Immobile Ascent is a portrait of sterile hyperactivity: a labor that doesn’t build, a progress that doesn’t liberate but consumes. The being becomes apathetic. This performance is a moving photograph in which the body, stuck in a repetitive gesture, becomes a symbol of stillness that challenges time, showing the absurdity of directionless progress.
This performance was developed based on the book The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han.
