Waste of Pleasure

Who is allowed to decide what taste and progress are? The universality of “refined” European design here is desecrated and bent, revealing the colonial legacies embedded in the standards of craftwomanship, materiality, and Modernist progress. The clean, white, minimal, rational aesthetic — long upheld as neutral or universal — is exposed as ideological and racialised. Central to the work is the commodity fetishism of materials: how value is projected onto rare woods, extensive labour behind gentlemen’s tailored jackets, and intricate woven forms only once they are abstracted, extracted, and consumed through a European, mostly white gaze. Waste of Pleasure is an outfitted interior, proposed for the confidence trickster or the degenerate who contravenes “sophisticated” taste and “decent” behaviour.