Twilight of the Goodtimes, 2010

"Between 1959 and 1963, Chicago Housing Authority builds 28 high rises that contain 4,321 public housing units and names the project after the first accredited African-American architect, Robert R. Taylor (1868-1942). By 1974, however, the modernist utopia becomes a postmodern dystopia (a deadly concentration of poverty, unemployment, and gang violence) in both reality and TV land, where unit 4,322 is a set for the popular program Good Times. My installation is about this sitcom and how it intersects with history, a Hegelian history." (Charles Mudede)

Charles Tonderai Mudede

1969, Zimbabwe. Lives and works in Seattle and Washington. Charles Tonderai Mudede is a critic, film-maker and writer who has two fundamental concerns - human history and sociality. In his films, Police Beat (which is a part of the permanent collection at MOMA) and Zoo (which screened at Cannes in 2007), his books, Last Seen and Politics Without the State, and his reviews in the Seattle weekly The Stranger, Mudede returns again and again to the historical and social production (shaping) of the human unit. As with the Italian Marxist philosopher Paulo Virno, Mudede firmly believes that the historical and the social are totally public and pre-individual meaning, the human individual is made from biological and cultural pre-individual materials. You are social and historical before you are yourself. Mudede has counted on the collaboration of the sculptor, Michael Leavitt, for the project, Twilight of the Goodtimes and he is currently working on a book called Pop Life: The End of the Citizen and Arrival of the Inhabitant.