COMMODITY FETISHISM, 2013

Commodity Fetishism was created in Kassel in 2013, parallel to my photographic series FEMINIST, and marks the beginning of my performative practice.

The film unfolds entirely within the city. Concrete urban sites become its stage: empty shopfronts, second-hand stores, kiosks, discount shops, stairwells, parking areas, as well as the school and after-school centre of my children — spaces of everyday circulation, some of which no longer exist.

Each day I went out into the city to explore myself, full of doubt about who I was and who I could be. I questioned whether I was an artist, a mother, a housewife. I was searching. The daily transformations were not performance in the sense of display; they were a way of testing identity against the surfaces of the city. Changing clothes, wearing borrowed wigs, putting on garments taken from my children, I used the body to move through uncertainty. This helped me.

The body became surface within an architecture of consumption — glass, concrete, fluorescent light. The titles of the images recorded only clothing size and date, reducing presence to measurable data, like goods in circulation. Each location functioned as a temporary set. Mother, artist, constructed persona: these positions did not follow one another but collided within commercial surroundings. The body entered and exited roles while moving through spaces designed for transaction, both observing and being observed.

Fashion appears here not as aesthetic expression but as urban currency, a code that regulates belonging and hierarchy. The body moves through commercial space simultaneously as subject and object.

The work was created before continuous digital self-display became habitual; the transformations unfolded without a virtual audience. In retrospect, the film reads as a solitary rehearsal within an economy of visibility, before the work turned toward dialogue, landscape and the collective voice