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HELP YOURSELF
performance (13 min) and installation, 2023, at Gulp an exhibition curated by Clara Chavan and Katia Leonelli at La Rada, Locarno.Help Yourself is a performance that features a hungry character pedalling through a rhythmic training program. Guided by the music and an automated voice, the character cycles while repeating affirmations that mix maxims of self help and motivational slogans, eyes fixed all the while on a slice of cake suspended in front of them. A crescendo, the character is told to reach for their goals and duly attempts to grab the cake. They pull on it and release a flurry of cash that they dive to devour. The performance ends with the character panting on the floor after having gorged themselves on money.
Sound design: Louis Dambrain
Cake engineering: Fig Docher
Outside eyes: Jonas Van, Gemma Ushengewe, Orfeo Aurora Lili, Basile Collet, Fig Docher, Louis DambrainPhotos: Riccardo Giancola
BREAKING NEWS
video (13 min) and installation, shown at Grad Show HEAD–Genève, 2022 and at foodculture days’ biennale, Vevey, 2023Breaking News is a video based on an investigation into greenwashed contemporary land grabbing for sugar and bioethanol production in Cambodia and Brazil. It investigates how the links between agro- and petrochemical industries are sustained by an internalised belief in a nature-society divide and an adherence to the fictive value of money. Situated at the intersection between social and environmental justice, the economic and juridic aspects of commodification and desire-making are seen and unseen from a decolonial perspective through the transmutability of Green.
Collaborators: Gabriel Shields-Hanau, Sawsane Hema, Gemma Ushengewe, Fig Docher, Louis Dambrain, RuYun Xiao, Mikhail Rokhjov
WE <3 GREEN
performative reading, 2022A 20 minute dramatic reading of work-in-progress screenplay WE <3 GREEN. The script weaves in numerous characters each engaing in some way with Product X, in its financing, production, marketing or consumption. The greenwashing of Product X is rendered visible by green glasses that the characters put on in order to see only what they want to see, or ignore that which they don’t want to know. The script is rooted in an investigation of sugar and the ways in which the making of taste is based on opposition to a certain class and/or race, exploitative production chains and unequal distribution (of wealth, power, food) - simultaneously camouflaged and fuelled by sweetness.
Collaborator: Gabriel Shields-Hanau
THE BAKER AND THE BARONESS
gustative performance, 2021The Baker and the Baroness is a gustative performance which tells the tale of the Baker from SAD BREAD (2021), as introduced to us by his new employer - the Baroness. The audience is invited to dine with her at a feast in which each course consists of progressively larger cakes. The Baker is by now a sugar addict who sees no meaning in his life that consists entirely of making sweets for the Baroness. Suicidal but unable to act, he procrastinates by hiding notes in the cakes that he bakes for the Baroness and her guests. During this performance, the Baroness reads out suicide note #32 aloud to her guests, in which the Baker recounts how he acquired taste and how taste now holds him hostage.
Collaborators: Gabriel Shields-Hanau, Josephine Devaud, Daniela Gutierrez-Gonzalez Photos: Fig Docher