Office: Hope you are doing well/ Best regards,

“I’m only human, not a machine.”

Even though we might sit next to each other in a carriage, the large, empty, negative space between two people can create a feeling of suffocation, if not alienation or being overwhelmed.  Do we doze off all the way to the end of the line, get lost in a dream as the light of the day gives way to darkness, wondering whether this forced cohabitation leaves us with nowhere to go? Do we stay pressed tightly together, or can we escape through the narrow passageways of the train?

Dzelde Mierkalne and Junny Yeung have created a simulacrum of pandemic life, where the workspace, still driven by capitalist mechanics has become the home environment where the thoughts and images of others have mutated notions of closeness and relating. We become driven by the logistics of the office tools, the human condition squeezed in the cramped confines of apartment boxes, scanning for signs of others out there, waiting that some unknown drama may deliver us a way to disembark. The glaze over our eyes staring into the keys of the calculator through the white plastic, grows thicker and renders our immediate surroundings alien. When all that was once familiar and close begins to shift our sense of reality, do we ourselves become a ghostly presence, penetrating the material surface yet cursed to haunt these narrow white walls?