Sweætshops®

2026 Residency

 🥳Party 🥳is a new work in progress by Sweætshops® asking: is democracy doomed to be a popularity contest? The project examines how the internet has fundamentally undermined our interactions with the democratic process, confusing our ability to share opinions online with our ability to affect real-world change. In the era of fake news, AI-generated misinformation, bot accounts and targeted polarizing content, the future is no longer in “what can we trust?” but in “what do we want to believe?”. If we want to be tricked, is it a trick at all? Coining the term “complicit duplicity” to describe this new form of magical thinking, drawing on dream-logic, Masonic tracing boards and the symbolism of individualist birthday party consumerism. The residency will be divided into experimental an open public focus group (all welcome!), trialing performance set-ups/choreography, and an “after party” all aligned with the Scottish parliamentary elections. Commiserations or celebrations. 🥳🥳🥳

About the artist

Sweætshops® (sweXtshops) is a multi-personality creative enterprise dedicated to unveiling the sweatshops/sweetshops yin-yang dialectic of worldwide societal inequality and shared exploitation. Operating primarily through performance initiatives, audiovisual production, and participatory conceptual research, using multiple personas to dismantle the individualist notion of the artist. Their methodology repurposes the 24/7 chaos, noise and waste of pop culture media, mass-produced items and online experience. As above, so below: reconfiguring familiar symbols into new magical frameworks, windows to extract insight and optimize systemic awareness of intersecting societal ills and hidden structures across human and inhuman realities.