"have you checked your screen time?" logics of excess

Guest Room is a format that fosters collaboration and sparks creative exchange. For this edition, Arles-based Alejandro León Cannock (Director, Manuel Rivera-Ortiz Foundation and Delphine Mansard (Director, Librairie du Palais) are exploring the theme "Have You Checked Your Screen Time? Forms and Logics of Excess."

"Have you checked your screen time? Do you know how much water is used to create an AI image? How far do the products you buy online travel before they reach your home? How much money is spent every year on weapons production? Can you imagine the size of the waste vortex floating in the North Pacific Ocean, or how much of the Amazon rainforest is destroyed every day?

We live in an age of excess, where excess is not an exception but a fundamental condition built into how our world operates. Consumption, production, the use of natural resources, labour, information, and technology all move faster and faster. What was once called “progress” now shows a darker side. The ecological crisis makes clear that unlimited growth has limits. These limits threaten both human life and the planet as we know it.

This edition of Guest Room brings together photographic projects that deal with excess not as a topic, but as a condition of the present. Excess is understood as a core logic of today’s capitalist system. Photography becomes a method to question, expose, and reflect on this condition, even when doing so also puts the photographic image itself into question. Photography is understood here in its expanded sense, encompassing documentary images, constructed scenes, archival material, moving images, and hybrid forms that respond differently to the same condition."