Manifesto

This is a prospective submission I made for the "Southampton City of Culture" open exhibition, which I've decided I probably prefer to the one I did actually submit. Like that one, it has a (slightly adapted) extract from Marx's Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844:

The less you eat, and drink, the fewer books you buy, the less often you go to the theatre, the dance-hall, the pub, the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, etc., the more you will save, and the greater grows your treasure which neither moths can devour nor thieves take away: your capital. The less you are, the less you express your  own life, so the more you have; the more of your life you give up, the more you store up of  ...  Well, what?

The framing version of the text ends with Marx's original words: "... the more you store up your alienated being", and "ghosted" behind the main version is the original text in German in a Fraktur font. A nice decorative touch, I thought, but one that would mark me out as precisely the kind of elitist intellectual snob (as if!) the judges would reject on sight. Which they did anyway!

Also, I guessed that the image of our city as occupied by alienated folk largely remote from cultural life living in rows of Victorian terraces in the shadow of the docks (as if!) might not be the modern, multi-cultural, bushy-tailed look they were after. We'll never know. It would make a nice poster, though.