Ingo Niermann & Mayte Gómez Molina

A video displayed in the front window of City Art Gallery Ljubljana provides an animated catalogue of environmental, social, political and emotional scenarios. The work is based on Ingo Niermann's recent essay collection The Monadic Age: Notes on the Coming Social Order, in which he argues that the two predominant post-liberal societal dispositions – a vision of harmonious coexistence of both human and non-human species on one hand, and, on the other, people isolating themselves in their own bubbles, identities and communities – are in fact interdependent, with monadism as a paradigm of self-sufficiency that overturns the liberal era and forces a reinvention of social parameters.

Together with poet, artist and programmer Mayte Gómez Molina, Niermann creates dynamic multidimensional visualisations of the books' key concepts like "monadism," "ego tribe", "automatic privacy", "co-op fantasy" and "intimate correctness".

To that end, Hieroglyphs of the Monadic Age introduces standardised representations of social actors and interactions, similar to the term symbols in quantum physics or the hieroglyphs in ancient Egyptian writing. While abstract in nature, a playful figurativeness – inspired by transversal cultural icons like Žogica Marogica (Speckles the Ball) and the Smiley – makes these representations easily relatable and memorable.

Supported by Pro Helvetia, Fachausschuss Film und Medienkunst Basel-Stadt / Basel-Landschaft, Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), and the Embassy of Spain in Slovenia.