Pointless Actions: An Extremely Pointless Guide to Renting a House for Dummies!

Abstract

This practice-led project seeks to critique housing within capitalism, utilising video and performative approaches to explore issues relating to home ownership within a performative framework of art making.

By employing Generation Z humour and costume as both strategy and method via actions through video to address an audience, this project seeks to provide commentary on the current housing crisis within Tāmāki Makaurau, Auckland.

As this project exists within the digital realm and employs performative actions of absurdity, new spaces are opened to examine productivity and performance and to challenge the notion of home ownership.

By undertaking temporary and ‘pointless’ actions using costumes, the project flies in the face of the limited acts and deeds tenants can do within a rental space.

The use of costumes gives voice to a range of anarchic personas, which are deployed to create a disruptive form of engagement within the rental space.

This engagement is through the process of Gen Z humour and performs a protest within the home, through the autobiographical experience of the artist.

By constructing humorous and absurd gestures in the face of the landlord living next door, this research aims to exploit the measures of capital that regulate and negatively affect the composure of multitude.

By dismissing capitalist power through performative actions, this project is a protest for the right to a secure home, giving power back to both the audience and the artist.