Caspar Heinemann and Claudia Pagès at Yaby

Artists: Caspar Heinemann and Claudia Pagès

Exhibition title: Reap, Mow, Cut, Harvest, Mow, Pluck, Crop

Venue: Yaby, Madrid, Spain

Date: February 20 – March 4, 2017

Photography: Alberto Vallejo / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Yaby, Madrid

2012 actually happened, that’s how we use actually now, but it did actually happen because i really meant everything entirely as usual

writing sonnets to exceeding the rubber touch of the Welfare State

for a towering seaweed Wicker Man here to

milk the blood moon for tidal bounty beach balls Mayday a fountain of obscure Marxist-Leninists glistens in the midday sunset

and/or becomes incommensurable

immeasurable tanks between positions is a boring knife

to die under ACTION BEFORE WORDS OR

WHATEVER that EARTH FIRST! slogan was beneath the No More Panic

health anxiety forum, the feral furry skin

the fact that nobody has ever spelt bureaucracy right first or even second time 1968 Decorative Memorial Plate that i hate

—Caspar Heinemann

Their physical condition: having healthy, long hair; and their hormonal and chemical modifications, have made harvesters desirable, a common fantasy. They embody a new social strata that people can only reach by buying part of their bodies, their hair. The new object, now circulating in the economic field, has become the projection of people’s desires, to masquerade, to play with their physicality, and to interchange DNA. It works both as a camouflage and a trans-object. This new product has also resulted in a new labor.

Placed between elite and regular workers, the harvesters gathered, creating a new economic system to survive. As there are only a few who can work in the hair harvesting business, they monopolized the hair market and created their own rules.

One of the first items on their economic agendas had been to suppress the relation between their sales and their salaries, and thus they abolished wages. This had been possible because of a lack of competition in the global market, so they had absolute control over the spot price.

Nevertheless they are constantly threatened by the possible emergence of competition. They had created a shared banking system, where they put all the money, and split it equally amongst themselves. In this system, it would not matter if someone’s hair grew slow or fast. They are not in competition with one another.

The back of their pamphlet clearly says: “This is just waste. Don’t waste your time talking about the waste.”

The harvesters believe that they are going rural. They are the land. The hair is the commons.

They take turns cutting their hair. Depending on the lengths, they decide the measurement of what they will put out on the market.

Once they cut it, they process the hair by dying it anew color; straightening, making it curly, or wavy; crispy or smooth.

It is impossible to define its gender, and once it’s outside, it cannot be placed anywhere, it’s just mixed DNA from external labor.

The new system they had created also generated a problem: they had produced a desirable object, and they had also become one. Their living currency status had become a threat: they were too fuckable. After years of working to create an external object, materializing it in both their labour and part of their soul, they could not understand how it was possible to still be trapped by becoming pleasure objects themselves.

They want to fight back against this issue by re-grouping and writing.

—Claudia Pagès