Europleasure International Ltd. Touch and Go
The setting is Liverpool, 2010. Cristina Lucas staged a fictional re-enactment with former employees of Europleasure International Ltd. The retired workers had once been strikers and occupiers of the factory. Lucas invited them to smash the windows of the now-abandoned factory where they had lost their jobs in the 1970s.
The meaning of Lucas’s gesture is twofold, summoning the spirit of past struggles against capitalism while drawing its protagonists into a new era shaped by the entertainment economy. In this stylised stone-throwing, this generation’s former defiance becomes performance, their history absorbed into the machinery of cultural production. To emphasise this ‘capitalisation of pleasure’, Lucas accompanies the action with the mechanical strains of a street organ playing The Beatles’ 1968 song ‘Revolution’.