Invited to take part into Örnsbergsauktionen – an artist operated auction house for studio produced design and craft – the project was based on a text written by Jorge on 2015:

“We are living in a very special time in history, a rare time. Homo economicus (1) has created a ready-to-collapse system in which social, cultural, political or intelectual values have been bitterly anesthetized.

According to French philosopher Jacques Rancière (2), “if politics form society, the political role of the artist is to confront the current hegemonic form with a possible form that is always otherwise”. Exactly within those parameters is where this project sits: Détournement explores a parallel reality in which economic value is no longer priority number one.

At the heart of what has come to be known as deindustrialization shut down factories or unemployment seems to be the direct consequences but what about peripheral effects, what has happened with logistics for example? Considering today´s post-industrial context, Jorge Penadés turns his attention to storage spaces and begs the question of what is the potential of those obsolete warehouses and their existing infrastructures. What if instead of objects we store information, what if instead of products we distribute knowledge?

Détournement sets out to transform abandoned spaces into pedagogical mechanisms by turning their unused shelvings into furniture pieces for the academic landscape. Being interested in the processes transforming society and investigating new territories that focus on creating conditions rather than just objects, this project sheds light on education as a radical political weapon and responds on the emergency to subvert the current criteria governed by our monetary-driven schizophrenia.”

(1) Daniel Cohen – Homo Economicus : Prophète égaré des temps nouveaux. Albin Michel, 2012.
(2) Jacques Rancière – The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Continuum, 2004.

Note: Détournement is a homage to Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, the name of the project references a methodology developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International and later adapted by the Situationist International.