THE SHARING ECONOMY by Sophie Berrebi
with a short reading and discussion between Sophie Berrebi and Guus Beumer at 8.30 pm
Thursday March 16, 8pmAmsterdam in 2014 is an historic city situated at the heart of the future. One of the biggest hubs for internet traffic in the world, it has become a favourite testing-ground for the new internet platforms that form the vanguard of what has been coined ‘the sharing economy’.
Gabrielle Bloom is a woman in her mid-40s, who works in the art world and is married to Anton with whom she has a child and an open marriage. During a visit to a feminist art collective, she is introduced to a new dating app that has recently launched in the city. With an almost unlimited number of potential partners suddenly available to her, she quickly develops a taste for the thrill of a brief sexual encounter. Working on an assignment to explore the impact of digital technology on our everyday lives, she comes across works of art that offer paths to explore this new tension between body and technology and help to understand changes in the way we interact with, and read other bodies.
Set during one intense and transformative year and suffused with art, sex and theory, ‘The Sharing Economy’ is at once a uniquely radical reappraisal of the way we view relationships and a tender and moving depiction of the many ways in which the human heart is capable of love.
Sophie Berrebi is a writer, art historian and exhibitions curator specialised in modern and contemporary art. She is the author of ‘The Shape of Evidence, Contemporary art and the Document’ (Valiz, 2015) and of ‘Dubuffet and the City: People, Place and Urban Space’ (Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2018), which received the 2019 Richard Schlagman award for best book of art history. ‘The Sharing Economy’ is her first novel.
