Skeletons of welded metal, swaddled in translucent, plastic skin, tower from above. Bolted together by thick steel pipes, fluro-orange lashing straps dangle down. Exposed steel ribs hint at buildings promised in glossy, CGI-enhanced brochures, covered in tarpaulin and hidden behind surveilled razor-wire fences adorned with ribbons of fluttering plastic. Occasionally a frustrated wind hurtles through, causing the plastic skin to shiver and the straps to gracelessly flail about. The sheeting is spray-painted, ripped, and in some parts burnt through; faint messages emerge in the low, red light. A milky fluid bubbles in a large tupperware, black cables claw out and over the box to form a knotted mess on the ground. The topography of financialised cities, urban environments turned into playgrounds for financial capital, rendered 24-hour construction sites. A pervasive phenomenon that has proliferated globally, ravaging the city I live in, Amsterdam, and the city I am from, Auckland. Walking through either of these cities is an experience of dislocated, alienated sensual stimulus. A new urban symbology constructed from the piles of industrial materials fenced-off except to an endless stream of around-the-clock labourers. It is this mise-en-scene that Grindhouse, Tash Keddy’s 2020 show at Parasite, gleans from. Scavenging through the detritus of Auckland’s financialised cityscape to present an installative interrogation of the industrial.

Auckland, like Amsterdam, has become a 24-hour construction site, the result of a construction boom set to increase a further 70% by 2029. A chummy liaison between GOVT. OFFICIALS and property developers functioning as around-the-clock engines of regeneration, a relationship which prioritises property rights in the process of urban transformation rather than the right to affordable housing. The result? An endless expansion of exorbitantly-priced buildings added to the city’s dislocated urban sprawl. From the boutique apartments neighbouring Parasite developed by Mark Cooper, Karangahape Road’s local real estate tycoon, to the state-led gentrification process in Glen Innes sugar-coated in the language of urban renewal, Auckland is a city held hostage. Cemented in a perpetual cycle of dirt, dust, and disruption, its victims are those priced-out, evicted, and displaced in the name of growth. It is from this construction-scape that Keddy forges, forming an industrial lexicon out of the materials flanked by sky-scraping cranes, diggers, excavators, and workers - to imagine an industrialism released from the stranglehold of financial capitalism. Inflected with a Gothic romanticism, Grindhouse takes the fragments associated with the industrial, those laden with both commercial and dystopic associations and presents them anew. Rather than forsaking the industrial as being “condemned to the modern hell of the new as the always-the-same”, Keddy’s assemblages create a dialectic constellation that attempts to rekindle industrialism’s embryonic potential. That potential being the emancipation of humans from want and hard labour through the forging of a just society out of material plentitude.

For Keddy, the industrial is radical in its emptiness. His references to Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre’s investigation into objects and modern forms of value and wealth creation attest to this proposition. In their text Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities, the authors pose the concept of ‘enrichment’, a value-increasing process in which narrative techniques are used to spotlight certain qualities of an object. Industrial objects aren’t granted this marketing exercise and therefore are excluded from surplus value creation. They can only decline in value over time. They have no story, no heritage, and in their standardisation are considered storyless. Keddy argues that this ‘blankness’ is a form of radical emptiness, allowing for utopian possibilities to appear in the rubble of the present. Keddy attends to this rubble using the tropes of the Gothic: addressing the contradictory features of the city, particularly the spaces that exist psychically and physically in the ‘margins’, without endeavouring for formal or aesthetic resolution. Crucially, the work refuses to fetishize the industrial nor its redemption, but rather relishes in its contradictions, weaving together physical matter that symbolises both growth and degrowth, utopia and dystopia. Burning ferris wheels, scorched plastic, overgrown ivy, construction materials yet to take form. Hinting at alternative constructions, alternative cities, ones we may only dream of. Haptic traces abound, hand-welded steel frames, hand-linked chain, handwritten messages bleached into rags and burnt into sheeting: true freedom is to desire what limits you. Marx clarifies this paradox, true freedom can only be realised through  regard for and dependence on others and society… what appears to limit freedom is what enables it.

Clicking through the photographs of the show immerse me in a hyper-local, yet strangely sterile and deterrioralised urbanism. Little explicitly ties the work to Auckland, as the material language evokes the global process of real estate becoming the engine of financial markets. Yet its location in Parasite gallery, an exhibition space hosted in the stairwell of Daniel John Corbett Sanders’ private residence - which emerged in response to the dire need for LGBTQI+ art spaces in one of the world’s most severely unaffordable property markets - concretely ties the work to Auckland. While it could be argued that the work renders Auckland anonymous, as for a show engaging with themes of urbanism and industrialism there is little in the way of objective landmarks to identify the city in, it is precisely this anonymity that speaks to how the spatialisation of finance homogenises cities into sterile, ‘smart’ networks. Designed to maximise the flow of information, money, commodities, and people. Grindhouse speaks to a global phenomena without forsaking the local, and viceversa, allowing for Auckland to exist as both a disconnected metaphor and, in its installative location, a visible and named reality.

In the detritus of construction materials, bathed in a low-red light, Grindhouse recalls an aimless nighttime walk through the city. Keddy describes the fragrant but muddy smell floating through the gallery as specifically evoking the walk home from the club through Auckland’s streets in the early hours of the morning. CK1 mixed with geosmin: damp, citrus notes mingling with dead bacteria released from soil freshly churned by diggers and excavators. Perfumed, electric bodies mingling with the night time rain and soil bacteria. Geosmin is evocative of my late-night walks home from work, both in Amsterdam and Auckland, at the hour when the awakening labour, the street-cleaners and rubbish collectors, crisscross with the haggard late-night workers and drunken revellers beginning their journey home. Red lights reflecting in the puddles, queues of cars lined-up in the McDonald’s drive-through, pleasure-seekers dry fucking against the fences of car dealerships, blanketed human forms lying in office entrances, construction flags hoisted high on cranes. Like the construction materials, geosmin feels suspended in a limbo of possibility. It’s the base note of regeneration, emitted by the process of land excavation and preparation, a signifier of change. Change we associate with skyscrapers and one million dollar apartments, an ingredient in the sensory experience of gentrification. Or, can we imagine geosmin, like industrial materials, as evoking both failure and possibility? Symbolising the progressive and regressive potential of urban change, the scent of newness that can be “always-the-same” or, with collective political imagination and force, radically different?

Despite speaking to the relentless process of urban financialisation, Grindhouse is not without hope. The work takes the topography and materials of this process and electrifies it with a romantic, and at times, utopic virility. The city is not entirely ruinous. There is hope to be found in the rubble of the past, present and future. It takes form in the lurking, libidinal human presence, in the shadows enacting desire between wrought-iron, ivy, and barbed wire-fences. An arm just visible behind a blown out mirror selfie, the scent of dancing bodies, graffiti, a ferris wheel set alite. A band of roving youths traversing the nighttime cityscape, ascribing their own desires and fantasies upon the half-built world around them.