Born as a Game photography project within the videogame Grand Theft Auto V, the work aims to investigate the economic and political aspects of consumerism and its related artifacts in contemporary times. I wanted to analyze the relationship between the rise and fall of the object of capitalist consumerism, ideological (forgetfulness, revaluation) and material (waste, replacement, obsolescence). The images show numerous identical models (except for the colors) of a sports car and a garbage truck, which embody the dynamics of luxury production and its disposal, stacked to represent both a national coat of arms and a funeral stele. These virtual installations produced by the act of consumption permeate our places of wealth and well-being, represented in the video game as a realistic simulation. The virtual people who pass by these totemic agglomerates do not let themselves be intimidated: like their "real" counterparts in the "real" world, they have assimilated the neoliberal and capitalist structures of the social world they inhabit. In this sense, the figure of the automobile is paradigmatic: an easily replaceable, recyclable, forgettable cult object. Its meaning lies in its duality of bulky object (material, symbolic, polluting) and erased object (one of the scrap objects par excellence, which can be shaped to become a small cube). Emblematic is the phenomenon of luxury cars abandoned in Dubai: a mix between wealth and financial collapse. I positioned the vehicles in the virtual map using the cheats integrated in the game, therefore a mechanism included in the system and made available to anyone. The continuous reappearance of vehicles is similar to the dynamics of the free market. The positioning of the vehicles required hours and hundreds of repetitions of the same cycle of actions. An automatism similar to that experienced by people during compulsive buying. I documented the work with hundreds of screenshots and dozens of videos.
The work consists of ten selected images.
