Whose land is this?

14 kitchen towels
black textile marker on cotton, embroideries, 70x50cm
2022

Gallery Jozef Kollár, Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia
Curated by Mária Janušová

To carry on with business as usual as if nothing had happened is an act of violence. Doing nothing is just as awful as doing something. Paralysis in the kitchen as a trigger. Why am I so affected by this particular war? Am I ignorant to other horrors?  Am I busy or blind? Tired?

I continue my daily therapeutic journaling, this time applying black marker to cotton kitchen towels. A typical artefact of everyday unpaid domestic labour, it reminds us of the fifty years since the activist and writer Selma James founded the Wages for Housework campaign, launching the struggle to recognise domestic labour as part of capitalist labour, and highlighting the fundamental importance of care and nursing work in society, because women's and girls' unpaid work generates a value of $10.8 billion (1) dollars a year, three times the size of the global technology industry. The conflicted nature of kitchen towels is changing its purpose. The kitchen towel is a message in a bottle, a domestic work postponed in an attempt to record the period since February 24, 2022, the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The shutdown of the extraction machines is postponed indefinitely. The countdown to climate change extinctions begins (2): geometric grid holds embroideries of three animals recently extinct due to climate change: The white Ring tail possum couldn’t survive for more than 5 hours in temperatures above 30° in the disappearing habitat of Australia’s cooler forests; and the Bramble Cay Melomys – a rat, couldn’t adapt to the 10 cm rise in sea level of the Great Barrier Reef measured between 1993 and 2010, nor to the frequent cyclones leading to repeated flooding of the Bramble Cay coral reef. The life of the Costa Rican Golden toad depended on the levels of small reservoirs. If there was too much water its eggs floated away; if there was too little water, the eggs dried up.

(1) https://yourstory.com/herstory/2020/01/oxfam-report-women-unpaid-work-wealth-inequality/amp
(2) https://www.carbonbrief.org/in-depth-qa-the-ipccs-sixth-assessment-on-how-climate-change-impacts-the-world

Photo credit: Beata Babiaková
Photo report on Artalk.cz

On public opinion

textile collage 100x140 cm

A camouflage net made of the words “PcSoEnUsDtOrEuNcVtIiRoOnNMEoNfT” continues into a text in cyrillic: Иван, что тебя скажет твоя мама!? (graffiti message to the occupying Warsaw troops in Prague, “Ivan, what will your mother say to you?” from 1968) and another one by the long-time employee of the main pro-Russian television station, Channel One, Marina Ovsyannikova, who held up a banner during a live TV broadcast stating: “NO WAR Остановите войну не верьте пропаганде здесь вам врут…” (NO WAR. Stop the war. Do not believe the propaganda. They are lying to you here. Russians against war). The term “pseudo-environment” was coined by journalist and author Walter Lippmann, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, who, in his book Public Opinion, mentions the need to insert a so-called pseudo-environment between humans and the environment. Walter Lippmann’s 1938 colloquium brought together 26 academics, economists and philosophers. Fifteen of the experts present later became members of the Mont Pèlerin Society, founded by the Austrian economist, theorist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek. At one of the first meetings of that society, Hayek said: “Public opinion is the work of people like us who create the political situation in which politicians move.”

Lippmann’s reflections on the pseudo-environment and the statements of Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s grey eminence, intertwine with each other like strands of neoliberal DNA in the river of tears of the most used emoji icon of February 2022, showing the structural transformation of communication by the impact of digitalization, according to Lipmann, into a simplistic “yes/no”.

Lipmann, 1922: In all these instances we must note particularly one common factor. It is the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo-environment. To that pseudo-environment his behavior is a response. But because it is behavior, the consequences, if they are acts, operate not in the pseudo-environment where the behavior is stimulated, but in the real environment where action eventuates. For certainly, at the level of social life, what is called the adjustment of man to his environment takes place through the medium of fictions. By fictions I do not mean lies.(1)

Surkov, 2021: I am the author, or one of the authors, of the new Russian system… My portfolio at the Kremlin and in government has included ideology, media, political parties, religion, modernisation, innovation, foreign relations, and (he smiles) … modern art. You are not going to feed people with some highly intellectual discourse. Most people eat simple foods. Everyone takes advantage of such people all over the world. Most people need their heads to be filled with thoughts.(2)

The shutdown of the extraction machines is postponed indefinitely. Mangrove forests (3) (embroidery) on the Pakistan-India border (and not only there), which form a natural barrier against flooding, reduce soil erosion and store five times more greenhouse gases than trees, are likely to disappear by 2050.

(1) Lippmann, W. (1998) Public opinion. Transaction Publishers.

(2) Foy, H. (2021, June 18). Vladislav Surkov: ‘An overdose of freedom is lethal to a state.’ Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/1324acbb-f475-47ab-a914-4a96a9d14bac

(3)  https://www.thethirdpole.net/en/energy/pakistan-indus-delta/