This piece began as a collage, and grew into a short piece of writing alongside it. It explores how dominant economic ideas shape both society and the living world — and the forms of labour and care that quietly sustain life: subsistence, ecological stewardship, reproductive work, all of it largely invisible to mainstream economic thinking. The collage traces the hidden flows connecting apparent spaces of prosperity to distant landscapes of extraction, asking what economic ideas decide counts as value, what counts as efficient, and what gets treated as if it were not there at all.
A red box. A closed system. A room without windows, its red walls letting bloody externalities shine through. In the middle of the room stands a springboard, with “mythology of capitalism” written across it in big letters. The diving tower could be a shadow, or it could be a headless man — either way, his head is covered by the mythology of capitalism, and capitalism itself is built on his body, lying heavy on him. His shadow, though, stands straight. On top of the board sits a bottle of wine with four glasses, but he is alone. He will jump into a big white box, blinded by its perfectly shaped walls. Inside, it will be empty — but he doesn’t know that, because he isn’t looking where he’s headed. Still, he is assumed to be the rational agent, embodying universal knowledge. All that counts is that he reached the top of the board. There, he is promised freedom and happiness. It is a lie: he has accumulated enough to jump, but even then he will not find well-being, because the box is empty.
The box is held up by legs — women’s legs, walking. It is so heavy, so large, that it covers almost their whole bodies; all we see are their feet, as if wrapped in a white dress knitted out of the box itself. Without their feet carrying it — carrying the whole red room — out into the street, the box would fall and splinter across the asphalt. The men inside pretend to manage their lives within it, ignoring what lies outside its walls and its limits, trapped in the belief that theirs is the best possible version of the world. For them, there is no need for change.
The earth is crying. The button has already been pressed; there is no going back. She said stop. Nobody listened. She said, you are flooding the paradise. They answered that they were finding more efficient ways to extract her materials, so that soon they would need less. Knowing they were wrong, she turned the world around and hung dead fish from the sky — still their blood trickled down, north to south. The men told her not to worry: their gains, from the top of the tower, would trickle down automatically to where her body was wounded. They kept building the tower higher, kept jumping, each leap needing more energy and hurting the legs beneath them more. The legs lost strength, but could not run, because the weight bearing down on them was too great.
She knew they were wrong. She kept asking herself why they had so much power, when their little room was so small compared to the whole living system she inhabited. Her world was made of many things, overlapping, depending on one another. Theirs looked empty, monotonous, closed — an abstract, universal room, with an infinitely growing tower that would, eventually, try to outgrow the earth itself.
Her voice went unheard for a long time. When the damage reached the edges of what the planet could hold, she sent a pink friend to confront the men in the red room — one who spoke in a language they could not measure: decay, soil, water. For the first time, the white walls trembled. The numbers hesitated. Still the men climbed, still they jumped. But the pink friend kept weaving through the cracks, spilling colour into their straight lines, tangling their tidy equations with rivers, roots and blood. The room did not fall. But its walls could no longer hold her reality inside it.
Nearby, yellow houses stand round and warm, their edges softened, their colour almost caring — bright enough that you might miss the darker multifamily buildings behind them. On their façades, small coloured patches promise responsibility, sustainability, efficiency; maybe they are only covering cracks. From those patches a funnel runs outward, invisible from inside the yellow rooms, gathering streams of material, labour and time — concentrating life at one end, where a figure stands holding eye contact, embodying all the places and people that labour, materials and energy are drawn from. Below, faces sit behind glass, watching a world that looks distant and almost transparent from where they are, empty bowls in front of them. And the earth herself lies on a hospital bed behind glass and warm light, fed drop by drop, watched over by figures whose faces she cannot see, hearing their voices without ever being part of the conversation.
Outside, scattered oranges lie on dark soil — abundance with no clear direction — and an orange frog watches quietly from above: a small signal that the living world has not yet disappeared. Between these fragments sits a word worth holding onto: Fühlung, the German for a kind of felt, bodily attunement — the capacity to actually feel the system we live inside, contradictions and all. Empathy and kindness as something closer to structural virtues, not just personal ones. The pink friend is still out there, still needs to reach the hospital room, still has more sparks to spread before she gets there. But she is moving closer to the red room all the time.