About the Unhealthy Preserves Collection

For better or for worse, peaceful or dirty, this our portrait. This is what we look like. This is the collective work of art we call the world. And whilst it used to be a small world, now it’s as tiny as our mobile phone.
And whether we like it or not, we are all part of it.

Hidden away somewhere, there is an algorithm catered to each and every one of us. It stores our tastes, our guilty pleasures, our dark desires. Our hunger for more.
This torrential deluge of alphanumerical codes reveals that, regardless of whether we are bricklayers, entrepreneurs, artists or Barcelona players, we are all trapped in the same web. Spellbound by a colossal spider that gives us social clout and placates our cravings around the clock, and in exchange it blinds us with its poison. It plays with our weaknesses. It feeds from our sins.

Injected with that digital poison, we see things through adulterated eyes. The industrial, the harmful, the toxic, it all appears before our eyes as if it were served up in a colourful, harmless can of soup. Nonetheless, it contains the recipe for all our evils. The ingredients are greed, lust, laziness and vanity. And they all snowball downhill as we collect likes on our way to hell.

This life, like canned soup, has nothing healthy and, even less, homemade about it. It lost all taste a long time ago. It is not nutritious, but it fills a hole. It’s a façade without plumbing. Passion without a heart. Speed without a moral. Karaoke without a singer.

Life is fast and instant, like soup and like a deal with the devil. It gets us out of the predicament as long as we are spellbound.

We live in the illusion of being free, independent, free thinking. And on the other side of the web, we are weak, unstable beings trapped in a can of algorithms. We are food for the big data spider spinning the social network of our lives.
We are soup. And the spider is poison.

In 1962, when Andy Warhol decided to paint 32 cans of Campbell’s instant soup as a pop symbol of the quotidian in the industrial age, all it took was that can to reflect the banality of a life that was colourful on the outside and insipid on the inside.
Now, that same instant soup has the flavour of our weaknesses in the digital age. Our basic instincts posted on Facebook, now Meta. The deep shoals where the soil stirs up.

Social media is a reflection of that liquid, plastic, throwaway life, a life that we can microwave like instant soup. And it feeds on our weaknesses. We don’t know what we want but we want it now. Myriad capital sins are nothing but the baits that taunt us every day. The fascination with social media that connects us to everything except ourselves. That puts us out of focus. That cooks us on the outside, leaving us raw on the inside. That fills out bellies and empties our hearts.

We hate social media. We love social media. We use social media. And meanwhile, social media enchants us with likes and the softness of fleeting stardom, 510K Facebook comments every 60 seconds, 4 billion likes and 136K photos just on Facebook, which leave us feeling happy and inebriated, ready to receive our daily shot of poison.
That said, I will leave you alone. I’m deeply sorry and I apologize from the bottom of this canned soup that my heart has become. I lost track of time writing this. Social media awaits.