While playful and performative, the work asks us to seriously question our current relation to objects while calls for new ways of co-existing in the world. Reimagining the idea of psychotechnics – the use of psychological techniques for controlling and modifying human behavior – in the context of social distancing, Makhacheva highlights our increasingly intimate relation to screens and gadgets. It is these shiny objects which, produced from rare earth minerals, mediate and control our experience of the world by extracting data-driven behavioral patterns. Remolding the form while retaining the function, this work exposes the structure of digital landscape, the shared territory we collectively inhabit. It proposes an alternative way of relating to the world of objects and others based on heightened material sensibility. Instead of mining data, the work asks, how might objects harness the “gold dust of emotional geology” to create new modes of collective existence?

I started Mining Serendipity during the pandemic, I was sitting at home in Dubai, browsing a lot of Instagram. I love contemporary jewelry, and clearly the Instagram algorithm was showing a lot of it. I also wanted to do something small, manageable, touchable, and something that can transport you to places daily, that can be a tool of remembrance, a reminder of something or somewhere that you want to go to. So, when Stijn Maes, director of the Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium invited me to create a work for their program “Solitude” I thought, let’s try jewelry. The Frans Masereel Centrum is not a large-scale institution, but they have been so generous with their resources and time, allowing me to fail many times before we arrived - the jewelry studio, Mineral Weather, and I – to the final work. I did everything long distance. Researches, zooms with Anna Pavlova and Alexander Olkhovsky from Mineral Weather, zooms with my project manager Anzhelika Baryshnikova. We were doing tests long distance and I actually have not seen the work until it was completely ready and the first batch was shipped off. That is how I work very often though, even before the pandemic, when I was traveling, I worked long distance with my studio, from the train, from the plane, from the installations, from airbnb kitchen tables, from hotel beds. But the pandemic forced us to face ourselves and the world differently, and for me it opened up a desire for a mindful change to shift from a reactive to an active work.

Another very important aspect of the Mining Serendipity ecology is that the box set as an unlimited, unsigned, numbered edition. It is sold by the non-commercial institution that commissioned it (Frans Masereel Centrum) at production price, with the objective to allow people to have as many encounters with the work as possible and simultaneously avoiding the narrative of a limited edition collectable item. It is important for me that this work is not read as a beautiful glistening trinket for sale, but as a model of different artistic interaction with institutions and audience. Here, you are entering a space of contemporary art at Louvre Abu Dhabi and you are asked to touch and try. When I work, with my studio we like to test the flexibility of institutions, it is a kind of dance. I am very interested in examining flexibilities and pressure points, but also working with institutions using the same institutional language. We have done a mirror in the shape of a neck for this display, because we wanted to avoid the selfie situation, so you can pick it up and look at the necklace only. If you do not want to dig too deep into the artwork, you do not have to, it is just beautiful and light, it is always your choice. These artefacts are territory less, they do not belong to a place, they are meant to travel and to help the wearer travel into different experiences.

What I am excited about in my practice is to try different things. Lately it is methodological experiments, I want to try methodologies, in a way I want to try to be as many artists as I can, and I want to try different scale. My works exist in very different registers. And with Mining Serendipity I wanted to create a mini museum. You can choose whether you want to wear one pendant or many. I call these pieces body-oriented artefacts, which is a phrase borrowed from one of my mother's article. She wrote a lot about traditional jewelry and how they structure your social, psychological and political bodies. I also am interested in the cultural meaning of these objects, they are not just pieces of metals. When I did the research for the work, I looked at plenty of traditional jewelry, and the background of it, I took many references and then digested it. I talked a lot with everyone at the studio, with Anna and Sasha from Mineral Weather, and many more people that one can see in our credits, from these conversations, the shapes that you see emerged. And as a parallel process I was trying to formulate the concept and what we were actually trying to do, this was emerging in my conversation with Andrey Efits, who did research and wrote all the texts that accompany the work. There are many playful layers in this work, which I hope is evident in the texts. Each pendant came together as I was thinking of the ways that people analyze the future. It could be affective forecasting, swarm intelligence and so on, and I wanted to shift and redefine all of them, into something generative that can actually be used to empathize with the world. Some things were made up, like the 1971 Sochi conference on psychotechnics, that we are referencing in the text, because we wanted something like that to exist. That is another thing that I love in contemporary art, you can just embrace a generative lie.”

Interview with Taus Makhacheva, 15 November 2021, Abu Dhabi