Year
2021
Tag
Installations
Choose Happiness. The words on the wall sound like encouragement, perhaps the most agreeable instruction a person could receive. Beneath them, a lectern holds a contract and a pen. The invitation becomes more specific when it is read at the distance of a signature.
To enter the agreement, visitors must select at least five of eleven clauses. They concern work, appearance, consumption, relationships and the management of dissatisfaction. Beneath each promise, a social statistic interrupts the voice of individual resolve.
Participatory installation · 730 Hours of Violence · Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona.
Installation documentation · 2021 · Silent excerpt from the exhibition camera archive.
Reading the small print
One clause commits the signer to speaking positively about work despite dissatisfaction. Another places productive and social performance ahead of physical and mental wellbeing. The final page makes the agreement’s logic explicit: a person who fails to comply will still be expected to appear happy for the common good.
The contract used the language of voluntary agreement to describe pressures that may be difficult to refuse. Its checkboxes made that tension practical. Visitors were invited to choose, but the range of choices had already been written for them. A pen attached to the lectern waited for a decision.
The lives that happiness promises
In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed examines how happiness becomes attached to particular ways of living. A promise can direct a person towards some choices and away from others, making conformity appear as the pursuit of a private good. Those who question the prescribed route can then be blamed for disturbing the happiness around them.
Happy Violence brought this argument into contact with the familiar tone of advice: remain positive, improve yourself, find a balance, make it work. Byung-Chul Han’s writing on internalised pressure offered a related perspective on demands sustained through achievement and self-exploitation. An instruction can be forceful even when it arrives as an opportunity.
Between the wall and the signature
The installation’s materials followed the movement from a public slogan to a personal undertaking. Engraved plasterboard gave the words a place on the wall. Printed A4 sheets carried them into the hands of visitors. The contract’s formal layout made each proposition available for reading, hesitation and refusal.
The figures on the document belong to the 2021 exhibition and remain in the downloadable originals. Their role was to set a promise against the circumstances in which it might have to be kept. The distance between those two accounts of a life was the work’s subject: what can reasonably be expected of an individual, and what has been handed to them to endure.
A contract of happiness
Read the original 2021 contract. Choose a language to download the two-page PDF.
English — download the original contract (PDF)
English contract, pages 1 and 2. Original exhibition document, Barcelona, 2021.
A slogan and a place to sign
The words Choose Happiness were engraved into plasterboard and installed with wall guides. A lectern held printed A4 contracts, with a pen attached by a chain. This small set of materials brought the public promise on the wall into the private gesture of a signature.
Assembly study · An explanatory reconstruction from the exhibition archive. Components are separated for clarity; proportions are illustrative.
Materials & components
- Engraved plasterboard and wall guides
- Lectern and printed A4 contracts
- Pen and chain
Part of 730 Hours of Violence, an exhibition by Domestic Data Streamers at Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona, 7–30 September 2021.
This project received funding through the MediaFutures project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 951962. The work reflects the authors’ views; the European Commission is not responsible for any use of the information.
