Pre/serving, Brno 2024

Renders, photo printing, metal welded frames 40 × 60 cm

In this project I am engaged in a comparative analysis of the theme of deficit as one of the key symbols of capitalist realism and post-Soviet heritage. In both cases it is a kind of engine of progress, but it is also important to explore the problem related to the satisfaction of needs and strategies of supply (the concept of The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction , Botulism). The comparative approach allows us to think about this topic in two levels: the creation of artificial deficit on the one hand and the shaping of deficit thinking as a model of perception of reality on the other. An important aspect of the analysis is the study of the dialectic of uniqueness and unification, their imaginary identity, as well as the interaction of products with different shelf-life and situational value. The starting point is the experience of the ex/worker in the field of advertising and a reflection on the routinization of the process of producing artificial deficit. As well as looking at the ways in which worker dissatisfaction manifests itself unintentionally or through subversive practices that leak into the project itself. There is a paradox here, however, that this act of protest within the system does not achieve what the worker intends, it just makes the project more obscure and sometimes more attractive. There is no such thing as bad advertising. The task of advertising is to recreate the feeling of deficit, while the worker in the cultural industry helps it to do so by pre/serving. This raises the question of the mindlessness of the worker and the alienation of creative work. An appropriate response here would be the slang phrase “let them cook”, which also refers to the approach to the process of creating advertising as a recipe, a cooking process. At the heart of the work is an experiment to create artificial conditions for the meeting of opposing symbols of fictional and real deficit. The experiment is based on a narrative that gradually reveals the geological layers of the process of ad production through subversive interventions in its various stages. As a preparatory base, interviews with industry workers and work with archives and literature will be recorded in order to compare advertising and cooking and the coding of objects. The experiment will apply and think through different effects and ways of creating a realistic illusion so that “the guest finds satisfaction in just reading the menu”.