The Cooperative Human

The film, photographs and objects in ”The Cooperative Human” have been inspired by the history of the Swedish Cooperative Society. The title refers to a person whose life, work, shopping, travelling, reading, cooking etc were all influenced by Cooperative ideas and enterprises. In Sweden the Coop had enormous influence on social and spacial change. The society of that time based on needs has today changed into a society of desires and extreme individualism.

In the film The Cooperative Human; different voices speak from an anachronistic perspective. Images and stories are excavated from the Cooperative archive and elsewhere to be reinterpreted. The archive holds Sweden's largest library on alternative communities and economies, a manifest of dreams and aspirations.The setting is a renovated apartment in a former Cooperative mill as well as the deep sea where we find the truely Cooperative animal Sisonophores…

What kind of society is imagined for a Cooperative Human today?How does consumption actually control our dreams. What ideologies are behind the design we consume?

Could it be the everyday that let us speak about the past: a past that holds dreams of a future that is our present?

What happens to the Cooperative concept in a world where digital and biological worlds melt together?

In "The Cooperative Human" we look forward from the past and look back at the past looking forward in order to get a vision of the future seeking an expression for the commons.