Simon Dybbroe Møller: What Do People Do All Day

As part of the exhibition Thick & Thin, experience the Danish artist Simon Dybbroe Møller’s series What Do People Do All Day (2019), which is a contemporary update to Richard Scarry’s 1968 children’s book of the same name. Replacing the original’s drawings of cute animals doing people-things in industrious and purposeful Busytown with real-life people in working situations, Dybbroe Møller juxtaposes Scarry’s idealistic “everybody is a worker” ethos with the “everything is work” reality.

What Do People Do All Day asks viewers to look at their own work and the work that makes their life possible, even if it might be invisibilized, or just looked over. We shop and cook and clean. We fall in love, we have sex. However, all these practices are increasingly mediated, alienated, and alienating. Someone else buys our groceries from an app, or we are that someone else. We swipe through potential lovers who are just images and a first name. Data and the management of complexity have seeped into even our most primal needs for sustenance and for touch.

A narrator’s voice quotes everything from Scarry’s book to Elio Petri’s film The Working Class Goes to Heaven from 1971, while non-actors in changing costumes stand frozen in changing scenographies.

What Do People Do All Day is screened in our cinema from 18 June to 11 August. The work loops during our opening hours (4 episodes, 30min).