Project Description

Who the People? is an artwork produced by Lanfranco Aceti and installed at Chetham’s Library and Museum as part of their permanent collection. The artworks, 16 framed prints, deal with issues of identity, data, post-capitalism and enslavement. Based on a concept of portraiture that mixes data, surveillance and the erasure of individuals’ stories, the installation at Chetham’s Library generates a narrative on the process of the erasure of humanity.

Installed within the oldest public library in Britain, the artworks, wrapped in chains, dot the shelves that display volume issues of Philosophical Transactions. They are in the corridor that leads to the room where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels worked together and began to write the Communist Manifesto.

The artworks will be placed in the permanent collection of Chetham’s Library and viewers will be able to view them during their visit to this unique heritage site in Manchester, United Kingdom.

Curator: Fionn Tynan-O’Mahony. Assistant Curator: Joe Blakey.

With special thanks to: Chetham’s Library, FutureEverything, Department of Design Informatics at Edinburgh University and the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London.