Master Thesis UdK

The work is a Master Thesis written at the University of Arts in Berlin. It juxtaposes theory and artistic praxis in the form of an assemblage. The end products of the work are: a cook book, a painting and a drawing film. While working on the project I tried to find symbolic representations for a material, physical labour in order to make it visible and culturally valuable. I translated the ECTS credit points, the abstract symbolic currency valid at the university, into hours of work in a cake shop, which have their own equivalent in money; money into pieces of cake, cake into calories, calories into energy, energy into a number of minutes needed to read a page of a scientific text, this into centimeters of a drawing and those into an amount of carbon dioxide produced whilst reading aloud.

I described my work as an assemblage, a concept which is inspired by Jane Bennett’s material philosophy and can be traced back to the Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari’s thoughts on bodies without organs, which I mixed with a dose of experience left behind by contemporary art’s history. Assemblage is a material_symbolic praxis_theory of labour that draws attention to the capitalist violence of rendering invisible the service work performed mainly by migrants and other vulnerable subjects.

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