expect extremely poor performance

expect extremely poor performance examines the collapse of self-image, exhaustion, and the pressure to perform in a culture of constant optimization, staged as a fragmented monologue between child, adult, and elder selves. The installation merges photography, video, sound, and digital performance: PVC prints on gym racks and tripods turn tools of productivity into sculptural supports, while exposed technical elements mirror the body’s fragility. Motion capture, 3D software, and AI animate my scanned face into three avatars, translating gestures into data and amplifying their emotional intensity.

2025
Fondation l'Abri, Genève

Longer version:

expect extremely poor performance examines the collapse of self-image under exhaustion and the pressure to function within a culture of constant optimization. The installation unfolds as a fragmented monologue between multiple selves: the child, the adult, and the elder, alongside exaggerated figures of performance, success, and self-control. Together, they stage the absurd and often pathetic attempt to “perform” emotion, care, and achievement in a world on the edge of burnout.

The work emerges from my own photographic practice, shaped by the constraints and logics of commercial image production, which is here reappropriated and displaced as both material and subject. Here, prints on PVC are mounted on gym racks and photographic tripods, turning tools of image-making and productivity into unusual sculptural supports. This hybrid structure exposes the tension between artistic expression and the necessity to produce, sell, and maintain an image of oneself. Cables, neon lights, and gaffer tape remain visible, exposing the construction of the image and its failure to look perfect.

Across the installation, large-scale photographic compositions depict hybrid figures, part self-portrait, part fictional embodiments, in which those three recurring characters emerge as guiding entities. Suspended between fiction and familiarity, these figures embody strategies for navigating pressure, expectation, and failure. Their presence is both sincere and ironic, oscillating between vulnerability and self-parody.

A 16-meter-long horizontal print unfolds as an endless feed. Fragmented and physically stitched together, it presents multiple performative versions of the self: hyper-muscular, hyper-productive, caring, entrepreneurial, and absurdly idealized. Held together by tripods and gaffer tape, this flow mimics the logic of digital self-display while exposing its artificiality and fragility.

The video is central to the installation. Here, the emotional gestures of the three avatars are animated using motion capture of my face. Internal thoughts, repetitive, anxious and often self-deprecating, are externalized and spoken aloud, turning private rumination into spectacle. This shift introduces both discomfort and irony: what is usually hidden becomes exaggerated and theatrical, emphasizing the cringeness that comes from telling one’s inner truth.

In contrast, small-scale images, resembling family snapshots, are placed directly on the floor and function as literal, almost banal fragments: memories, projections, and internalized injunctions. Reduced in scale, ghostly and stripped of display, they echo the quiet persistence of social expectations embedded in everyday life.

At once intimate and systemic, Expect Extremely Poor Performance approaches failure through irony and self-exposure. If contemporary culture demands constant visibility and self-optimization, the project suggests that the self has become the final commodity to be produced and performed. By embracing awkwardness, excess, and dysfunction, it reclaims vulnerability not as authenticity, but as a critical and unstable form of resistance.

https://youtu.be/WF94cjPcJ9s