Annika Eriksson b. 1956
Maximum Happiness (2018)
Duration: 22 minutes

Maximum Happiness was made as a five hours performance and the video shows the first seven minutes of this performance. Towering over Sheffield like a majestic fort, Park Hill Estate is a landmark building, yet one which now stands with a ghostlike emptiness. For the exhibition the artist had the façade of the building complex illuminated by floodlights for one night. In a visible state of decay, about to be redeveloped into contemporary apartments, it still testifies to the unparalleled vision of an imagined future. The title cites the architects of Park Hill who wrote that, although they did their best to fulfill the residents' wishes "it is clearly impossible to secure the maximum happiness for everybody." Yet they hoped "that Park Hill is a satisfactory 'machine for living in'." In the night of its illumination this modern machine was allowed to perform one last time, maybe to display its exhaustion, maybe to revivify the promise it once embodied.