In Prosecco Wisdom, Lizzy Deacon and Ika Schwander (both b.1999) present a new film and a large scale work on paper.

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The film, Prosecco Wisdom (2024), traces two characters' pursuit for contentment in the abject capitalist backdrop of a holiday paradise that is usually populated by groups and couples. It references the YouTube trend of girls’ post-breakup solo-travels to all-inclusive resorts as they search for meaning and agency in a context not designed for them.

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The characters, chasing a salvation formulated by online vlog healing journeys, instead sink into the bleak mundanity of the anonymous resort, drifting around on a klonopin-cloud, alienated and unraveling.

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As they become consumerist spectres distractedly blurring into the spectacle of the experience, the film maps their desires and anxieties, and fictionalises their envy in the net imaginary of the online girl.

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The viral material of what Grant Bollmer and Catherine Guiness term the Corpocene, a junction in late stage capitalism wherein individuals achieve the status of living, breathing micro-corporations, serves as the visual reference point for much of the exhibition. The objects, locations and moments, capture the banal lifestyle content of simulated online experience.

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The large drawing, Old Money Couple Playing Tennis (2024), is a voyeuristic portrait of a young, wealthy, flirtatious couple that can be read as the desire and lack that propels the central characters.

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At its core, Prosecco Wisdom exposes the frailty of influencer-capitalism’s aspirational model, how it’s prone to obsessions, compulsions and neuroses. How, ultimately, beneath the glossy veneer of leisure and luxury, there is a specific abandonment in digital labour, that commodifying the self as content is an exhausting and void exercise.

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“The worst part? After an exhausting flight and long day, I laid down in my bed (which I was hesitant to even get into) and there, right above me, stuck to the headboard, were two fake human eyelashes. They looked like someone had glued the backs of centipedes to the headboard. I screamed. As a consolation, the front desk offered me a new room. Equally as unclean, but eyelash free. I asked that my bill be reimbursed for the night’s lodging on account of the inconvenience and traumatic experience. Her response, “No ma’am. We’ve made the situation right.” Um. No, ma’am, you haven’t. I will live the rest of my life with horrific flashbacks of those lashes. I have stayed at roadside motels with shag carpet that was more enjoyable.

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What this hotel needs is a wrecking ball.”

 

- Trip Advisor, 2023