Brave New What? New Archetypes/ More Naked Adventures in Hypotopia

Brave New What?
New Archetypes/ More Naked Adventures in Hypotopia
Photography/Installation
Jesse Darlin’ 2008


What if there’s nothing left that is sacred?
What if there’s nothing left that is profane?

We live in the wreckage of postmodernism, at the end of the world, at the top of the food chain. Consumer culture is a ravenous machine, churning out commoditised images and ideas for the masses and generating archetypal waste and philosophical detritus. Both the sacred and the profane have been made banal by overexposure and re-appropriation: branded and saleable gods, off-the-shelf ideologies, beauty you can buy.

Somewhere in the sub-strata and trash exists a parallel world in which the obsolete prototypes and archetypes are recycled and re-interpreted. This is Hypotopia, a fragile and shifting psycho-geographic plain made up of temporary autonomous cells and spontaneous aesthetic subcultures. We are bottom-feeders, hunter-gatherers, bricoleurs: we inherit the waste that washes downstream from the mainstream. Alienated from consumer society and searching for the lost archetypes hard-wired into our own code, we create a brave new whatever from the surplus and the garbage and from precarious moments that cannot be bought or sold.

Jesse Darlin’ is a pirate, rebel, neo-romantic, rent-a-muse and archetype-in-progress working in experimental performance, post-pop music and mixed-media bricolage. She draws inspiration from DIY culture, hacker sensibility, guerrilla theatre, outsider and found art, and from wireless memes that cross platforms and borders. She mostly lives in London and Amsterdam and hangs out in the Hypotopian ether.