Aernout Mik proposes to re-enact scenes from a series of highly publicized court trials regarding corruption schemes of a government official. In Shifting Sitting attempts at justice are repeatedly eclipsed and made futile by predetermined outcomes based on greasy politics, accentuated by seductive star power. Mik's work becomes a satirical innuendo of the ironic paradoxes involved between the law and governance.

On trial is Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister and founder of The People of Freedom party, who also happens to be one of Italy's greatest tycoons, media giants and sports team owners. He is infamous for his long history of weaseling out of multiple corruption accounts based on his own legislations that continuously grant him immunity. In the past fifteen years, Berlusconi has been on trial seventeen times for problems such as bribery of police officers and judges, mafia collusion, false accounting and tax fraud. The legislative process of the Berlusconi trials has become routine. The narrative typically goes as such: Berlusconi is accused, he arrives in court, he is acquitted. Each trial seems a re-enactment of the previous - the same overarching story but with minorly differing twists and details. And Berlusconi comes out on top every time.

Mik hones in on an underlying rhythm inherent to these reruns. Specifically, Mik's dramatization of the antics that occur both during and following these legal proceedings, a focus on the commotion of various fluctuating gestures, obscures any clear detection of purpose, rationale or expected resolve. Noise itself is the drama. The meanings behind what appear to be suspicious glances, exasperated sighs, disturbing silence, developing consensus, seeming oppositional forces, traces of a potential moment of truth or dire impasse, are ultimately part of a popular farce. Anticipatory senses are then false, and the trial becomes once again anticlimactic, for a system in stagnation means that the roles of those involved cease to ever change.

Shifting Sitting situates us within the theatrics of spectacle during these familiar confrontations between politics and the law - occasions that generate moments of collective fascination, becoming quickly titillating to overshadow causes of conflict and the tactics of resolution. Resolution is in the ritual itself.

For more on re-enactment in Aernout Mik's work, please see the text by Brooke Kellaway.