Street Nuisance

Overview

The work is inspired by a text of the same name, written by Charles Babbage in 1864. Better known for his computational inventions, Babbage also rose to prominence for his satirically obsessive battle against noise pollution from buskers in nineteenth-century London, advocating for silence as a civic right. Departing from this premise, Spagnola’s new video installs a street performer on loop. The video rehearses a series of outmoded archetypes—the hippie, the Californian, the rocker—and reprises the child busker character from her earlier works to reflect on the antiquated promise of self-reliance and the systematic elimination of shared experience.