Hopium Economy: Substance Dependencies and the Technosphere

In Department I, the artists worked on their most recent project “Hopium Economy.” The project seeks to narrate a larger context for the currently ongoing opioid crisis now bearing down on Midwestern USA, tracing its origins not simply to addiction and dereliction, but instead drawing out how this cycle of dependency, depression, and despair arises from a nexus of factors playing out over public health systems, rural and urban divides, pharmaceutical industries, racial tensions, colonialized monopoly, and de-industrialization. The project also intends to challenge the way we conceive substance dependencies and their history, by regarding addiction as a substantial mode of our existence, and as the possible core of our relationship to the planet. In an extended sense, substance dependency is not only a metaphor, but the very essence of our incapacity to respond to the demand for changes in the Anthropocene. During their time at the Max Planck Institute, Beate and Oliver conducted interviews with scholars in Germany and will develop a performance from the material collected.