Now that societal foundations – economic stability, collective memory, social cohesion, and the ability to forge a future (you name it!) – seem to be disintegrating, Astra Taylor and Katrin Mayer offer parallel but complementary lenses to examine what remains. Where to start? Rather than disrupting dominant narratives (in a reactionary sense), both Taylor, an activist, and Mayer, an artist, engage in their practices of uncovering, reassembling, and reimagining. They make visible the subtle, often insidious mechanisms that erode personal and collective agency. Taylor dissects capitalism’s ability to harness insecurity as a tool for domination, while Mayer’s transgenerational feminist installations depart from the fan as an object of inquiry, expose the hidden labor behind the origins of computing, which is more female than has been accepted. They envelop the issue like a soft, anticapitalist enlightenment bath.
Taylor’s writing, gathered as a series of essays in The Age of Insecurity: Holding Together While Everything Falls Apart, traces how the neoliberal system has woven anxiety, fear, and economic vulnerability into the fabric of everyday life, ensuring that uncertainty permeates every aspect of our existence. Through manifold examples, Taylor shows us that precarity isn’t incidental but central – a mechanism for control that disproportionately affects those already marginalized. Women, migrants, and the working class are deprived of basic social foundations, turning insecurity into both a structural and personal condition. It is this emotional toll, the slow, insidious erosion of one’s sense of safety and self-worth, that Taylor so piercingly critiques. Resistance, she argues, is not just political, it’s emotional, a fight to reclaim the stability that late, racialized, accelerated capitalism continuously undermines.
This is not resistance per default: Taylor traces how the architecture of insecurity not only undermines labor rights and economic stability but also depletes our emotional resilience. This, in turn, creates a kind of self-reinforcing cycle, where fear and anxiety feed into a broader acceptance of inequality and weaken the very notion of collective struggle. Taylor highlights the subtle ways in which this insecurity is nurtured: in the normalization of gig economies, in the creeping erosion of public welfare, in the demand for constant productivity that leaves little room for rest, reflection, or community time.
On the other side of this exploration, and of the imperial realm, is Katrin Mayer, whose #c0da at Badischer Kunstverein – a solo exhibition as well as a collective call to herstory – looks at another kind of erasure: the elision of women’s labor from the history of technology. Just as capitalism hides its mechanisms of insecurity and social reproduction, the field of computer science has long obscured the vital contributions of women such as Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, and the ENIAC programmers. Mayer’s exhibition doesn’t simply restore these figures to their rightful place in history; it challenges the very architecture of how technological narratives are constructed. Through site-specific installations at the Badischer Kunstverein, Mayer creates a dialogue between feminist histories and the physical, spatial realities of Karlsruhe, a city steeped in technological advancement and with a core spatial division that resembles a fan, a symbol of wireless internet, and a female pubic zone.
Within different registers layering on top of one another, Mayer focuses in particular grammatures of how patriarchal and technological systems have erased the labor and contributions of women. #c0da comptoir #fanny carolsruh approaches all these matters not as a straightforward critique, but as an immersive exploration of these invisibilizations. It simulates the artist’s desk, the internet cafe, and the library corners, on which the pleasure of uncovering truths relies. Using materials including office furniture and wall fragments, Mayer constructs metaphors for the labor and lives that have been obscured, particularly the women who comprise the backbone of early computing. The office relics speak to a bygone era, where women’s work was visible, only later to vanish, as digital labor rendered it invisible. Through her speculative re-readings of Karlsruhe’s urban myths and her invocation of feminist writing traditions like l’écriture féminine, Mayer resists the singular narrative of technological genius, replacing it with a mosaic of collaboration and erased histories.
By curating environments that blend the digital with the historical, Mayer offers not just a space for reflection, but an active reconstruction of the archives of forgotten labor. The installation draws on contributions from a diverse group of artists, writers, and thinkers, including Anna Cairns, Jasmina Metwaly, Sadie Plant, Romy Nína Rüegger, and others, each bringing their voice to bear on feminist histories that have been systematically effaced from the technological present. Mayer’s spaces ask us to reimagine the workplace, the archive, and the digital space as places where feminist critique can unfold, and where new histories can be written. Both Taylor and Mayer are preoccupied with the same question: how do we see what has been made invisible?
In Taylor’s case, this means tracing the emotional manipulation of capitalism's ceaseless demands for productivity, efficiency, and self-reliance which mask its inherent inequalities. For Mayer, it means uncovering the hidden architectures of technology, the histories of women’s intellectual labor buried beneath layers of patriarchal storytelling. Both expose systems of oppression that operate subtly and stealthily, yet with devastating consequences. Together, they restore missing threads to the fabric of collective memory, as they share a sense of urgency: the need to make what has been erased visible, to resist what has been designed to be left obscure.
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Cover: Katrin Mayer, #c0da comptoir #fanny carolsruh, Collage for invitation, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, 2024. Image editing: Ana Aguilera, Code: Anna Cairns, City layout: Stadtarchiv Karlsruhe.
