The Training Room
The Awareness Muscle Training Center Exhibition at Museum Villa
Stuck begins in the training room. This room is the center of
the awareness muscle training format and consists of a selection
of different exercise machines. These sit on carpets that are
printed with pixelated images of natural crises; wildfires, the
melting of icecaps, locusts eating crops, etc.
On the walls hang more carpets, accompanied by neon,
mirror-backed signs. These carpets are printed with Geoffroy’s
own sketches and these and the neon signs all include direct,
powerful slogans, such as “Push back the Propaganda!”, “Train
your active empathy muscle” and “The moment of change WAS now”.
These slogans grab the audience’s attention and are a starting
point to understanding the theory behind Geoffroy’s exhibition.
The
training room is the interactive hub of the exhibition; the
carpets act as an introduction and a signal of the exhibition’s
themes to the visitor, while the machines provide a physical
engagement to the visitor. Instructors clad in neon pink and
yellow workout clothes, invite the visitors to participate in a
training routine. Unlike in the gym, the purpose of this routine
is not to gain muscles or improve strength, rather to train the
visitors awareness of their own actions and positions in regard
to empathy, apathy, power, fear and personal responsibility. The
instructors are a team of volunteers specially in charge of
conducting the interviews. The questions that the instructors
ask, follow the topic of the given machine: a boxing dummy deals
with fear, an exercise bike revolves around visitors empathy and
apathy, a pull down machine questions visitors notions of power
and order, a shoulder and chest machine named the “papillon”
(due to its resemblance to a butterfly when in use) focuses on
what impact the user feels they can make in the world and how
much responsibility they take upon themselves. The last machine
involves no exercise and the visitors are asked to reflect on
their lives and how they feel about what they have done with it.
The routine can differ in time length, sometimes taking ten
minutes and sometimes taking much longer, depending on the
willingness of the visitor to open up and engage with the
topics.
The
training room functions as an activation point; it is reaching
out to the visitors, attempting to wake them up, to consider
their own place in the world and to be aware of what is going on
around them. Engaging in the routine in this room can change the
visitor’s approach to the rest of the exhibition. It is easy to
go to a museum, to feel informed on issues of injustice or
corruption and leave feeling like you have done something. The
training room aims to get visitors to contemplate what their own
position in everything is. There are rowing machines with
mirrored images of refugees drowning, set in front of a neon
yellow carpet inscribed with the statement “Beeing a passif
witness makes me a criminal”. This is after the notion that if
you witness a crime and do nothing, you become guilty by
association. Doing nothing is still an action.
The
training room is important in its connection to the rest of the
exhibition. It centres the visitor’s ideas of the goals of the
awareness muscle training format and while ascending the spiral
staircase to the rooms above, visitors are left to reflect on
their ideas of the world and themselves. They observe the rest
of the exhibition as an extension of these concepts and feel
personally involved in the subject matter. The training room
connects to the strategy room as an ensuing opportunity of
action, while the energy room amplifies their mindset to
consider a broader audience. It should inspire self-reflective
questioning: Where do I stand in the world? Where does everyone
else? Could I be doing more? Should we all?
The
purpose of the training routine is not to fill the visitor with
guilt or fear; Geoffroy does not aim to create an energy of
hypocrisy and shame, but rather wishes to inspire a drive for
change in his audience. While in situ, as visitors test their
physical ability, they are pulled into a deeper, personal search
at the same time. The combination of physical effort and
self-evaluation can hopefully stimulate a reconsidered and more
precise level of awareness, on an individual and global
scale.
