#523 Food Line

The discomfort of passing a line of people waiting to get free food from a charity organisation isn't only due to empathy for the people in need. There is also a feeling that distributing aid is a public responsibility and that the presence of food lines and beggars is a sign of societal failure.

Paper Cups is a series of paintings with imprints from regular paper cups. The kind you get from fast food places and the type often used by people begging in the streets. The series takes its starting point in economic resources and begging as a subversive act in a system of capitalism and neoliberal policies.

It is also about prioritising material conditions in a broader sense, as in historical materialism, and about gaining agency for demands as a group. For a movement, a protest or an insurrection to become a subject, an agent with the power to act, it needs to ground its ideas in practical solutions, in a psychoanalytical sense, to move from the Imaginary to the Symbolic. This entails touching base with the void of the material Real, where the pureness of the intent - the initial message- will always get somewhat polluted and distorted.