How do you perceive the current scene you're working in? How does being based in Zurich influence or shape your approach?

I’m assuming you’re referring to big-city Zurich, not the canton, so I'll stick to the former for clarity’s sake. Right off the bat, I must say that I’ve never lived in a different larger city for a longer period, so it’s a bit hard to make a substantial statement. I’d say Zurich is culturally quite rich and dense, especially if you compare its size to other European cities. There are a ton of off-spaces, galleries, and cultural institutions. Every now and then, a temporary space pops up too. You ought to be selective when planning your Opening-Thursdays. Usually, there’s too much happening at once, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. As frustrating as the scarcity of time may be, ultimately, it makes us prioritize and reevaluate what matters to us. Zurich has plenty of resources to offer in the cultural field, attracting artists from everywhere. It’s just the right amount of cosmopolitan, allowing for niche emergences to bubble up. It’s so glocal and more on the fast-paced side for a Swiss city. 

I don’t know yet how being based here precisely shapes my approach. To answer that, I’d first have to work and live somewhere else for a while. Ask me again after my master's degree in a few years a là Billie Eilish for Vanity Fair. (Laughs.)

In any case, since Zurich is still überschaubar (Engl. manageable, easy to grasp), it’s definitely not very demanding to stay in touch with my peers, to keep up a consistent conversation about the projects we’re working on, things that keep us up at night, or new trends we notice in the scene here – you can always feel the winds changing fairly quickly. This exchange is so dear to me and essential to my practice. For me, it’s part of an autotheoretical methodology, dragging theory back to the everyday, rooting it in my embodied experiences, and vice versa. 

One thing is for sure, I love roaming around Bahnhofstrasse, observing flashy shop windows, how the security guards in designer stores stare you down, the dark-blue-suit-ed finance bros drinking their espresso macchiato in front of the Confiserie Sprüngli, or tourists carrying an abominating but awe-inspiring candy-like amalgam of shopping bags. The cold sheen of Swiss bureaucracy and the superficial glitz of consumerism are central themes in my practice. 

In your work, a recurrent theme involves intentionally shaping online personas – how do these personas correlate with the particular audience (or network?) you envision while working on a project?

I’m not necessarily interested in specific personas or characters – if anything, maybe archetypes like the Influencer or Livestreamer. Rather, my work is about the manifold identification processes shaping our personas and identities that are inextricably linked to AFK¹ and online infrastructures surrounding users. The cultural situation personas are embedded in and their historicities, which I find much more compelling at the moment. Even though I’m wary of over-relationalising objects – losing sight of what they are – tracing the fabric of things, their patterns, and frayed edges, is an integral part of my research. If I refer to a persona, I’d say, it correlates with a particular audience as far as said audience can read the shared cultural codes making up the persona in question – it’s the correlation correlating that is most interesting to me. I see the personas I’m performing or assembling as a means to talk about topics that interest me at a given point. They’re more so standardised vessels or echo chambers – the result of users drawing from the same cultural scripts of desirable personalities, the same trending aesthetics or cores, ultimately, creating uniformity.

How does your everyday online presence define the aesthetic essence of your works? Has there been any online platform that has significantly influenced your visual or theoretical perspective?

Aesthetically, Instagram’s always been a major influence, with its reduced and sleek UI. Generally, the devices I use daily – the space grey aesthetics of my MacBook Pro and iPhone – the entire “neo-bohème-Silicon-Valley-core”, greatly inspire me.

Early YouTube beauty gurus/vloggers had a huge impact on me as well. Especially the makeup tutorial x story-time format. The juxtaposition of casual, cutesy oversharing and enviable, almost alchemical makeup skills is like a catchy choreography. So precise, playfully graceful, and entertaining. Fashion magazines, which have many visual parallels to social media interfaces, also inform my work. Broadly speaking, surfaces that must be consistently polished to maintain one’s image – for others to see their reflection in it – are what define the overall aesthetic of my practice.

Theoretically, again Instagram and TikTok had a considerable effect on my perspective insofar that I started taking the time I spend on these platforms more seriously in the past few years, which made me want to learn more about their structural and ideological intricacies. This led me to read up on a bunch of media theory and sociology by writers like Helen Hester, Shoshana Zuboff, Legacy Russel, and Franco Berardi, trying to expand my understanding of "platform capitalism"² and the ways in which processes of self-actualisation are entrenched in it. In short, I like to surround and adorn myself with smooth and shiny things, and I want to understand why.

Incorporating social media imagery like selfies and meme formats into your art, you also repurpose everyday objects, such as the nail polish containers featured in your 2023 exhibition ‘subtle fembot autospy’, or screenshots of tweets (angel complex, 2022), almost like turning these items into forms of ready-made poetry. How do you perceive your relationship with textuality, and how does it intersect with the phenomena of the digital world? 

I’m never quite sure if text functions as the foundation or scaffolding in my work. Probably both. It’s always an integral part of my working process, be it when I’m actively delving into something or when I’m already realising a concrete project. My relationship with textuality is intricately entwined with and can hardly be separated from images. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I think I was 18 when I first voluntarily read a text-only novel (!) because I was genuinely intrigued by its back-cover blurb (it was Kafka on the Shore by Murakami, for anyone wondering). Of course, I’d read countless books for class before, but for some reason, I dreaded it from day one. I still read a lot growing up, however, on my own terms. Instead of devouring the Eragon or Dune saga, I buried my nose in fashion glossies, beauty blogs, and manga, where images and text go hand in hand. Not only did this significantly contribute to my view on text and images and how I approach them in my work, but also to how I perceive and present myself. Everything is text to me – scripts, protocols, codes, and ideologies that are embodied, internalized, objectified, architectural, structural, written, and spoken. It might be a bit reductive and overly pragmatic, but that’s currently my preferred way of looking at my surroundings and myself.

Gaia Del Santo: angel complex, 2022, steel plate, ballpoint pen on paper, stickers on plastic sleeve, installation view at Last Tango, Zurich, 2023, photo by Luca Klett

Most attention economy-borne social media interfaces and the metrics of their algorithms require users to simultaneously describe and advertise themselves objectively, in a one-dimensional clear-cut way, breaking down the self into bite-sized categories of taste, personality, and opinion while also performing a fantastical ideal of how one wants to be seen. Hence, contributing to a mode of self-apprehension and self-actualisation, in which language and visual means of representation are used to externalise and objectify  the self. This textualisation of subjectivity is, I think, best captured in selfie practices, where body language and embodied language/text become painfully tangible. A selfie is a manifestation of an ongoing process of identification that acknowledges the conscious performance for the image, camera, and ultimately audience, by breaking down the photographic fourth wall (Nathan Jurgenson in The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media³, 2019), and a culmination of research and skills on how to pose and look. Said research is the result of an engagement with and exposure to a normative, sexist, and often deeply colonialist discourse that surrounds us on TV, in magazines, online, in advertising, in books. Everywhere we look we see textual images and codes we ought to emulate.

What are your thoughts on practices (aiming to improve spiritual well-being or mental health) that advocate for radical reduction or complete cessation of online presence?

I don’t think spending less time online will necessarily improve one’s mental health, and anyone who advocates for that is choosing the easy way out. There are so many Internets and even more reasons to be online. What if somebody is bedridden due to chronic illness, can’t leave their house, has to work from home, and their only form of interpersonal exchange happens online? You can’t just tell them to put their phone away when they’re feeling down – board-certified psychologists exist for a reason. There is no silver bullet that can account for all experiences and burdens.

Most approaches to improving one’s mental health by reducing screen time have this insidious underlying current of neoliberal responsibilisation, turning mental health into a purely subjective issue. This makes it easier for the techno-anxious self-help industry to sell users some form of digital detox iteration, as Jurgenson posits.

I believe it’s about the content users are seeking and consuming, and the content that is subsequently recommended to them. It’s about unrealistic expectations and beauty standards, subreddits filled with blackpilled incels, alpha chads who are trying to lookmaxx their way to happiness, and so on. My flatmate has an average screen time of 14 hours, and she’s doing great. Watching TV or talking to people in your social circle who don’t mean well can be just as harmful, if not worse. Of course, social media is designed to keep users online, to keep them hooked on an app and glean data, but I want to believe that users still have agency and can to some extent curate what they’re consuming.

Silvia Federici writes in Caliban and the Witch: "The revival of magical beliefs is possible today because it no longer represents a social threat. The mechanization of the body is so constitutive of the individual that, at least in industrialized countries, giving space to the belief in occult forces does not jeopardize the regularity of social behavior." The internet is also teeming with emerging esoteric subcultures. Do you think the online realm has the potential to unleash new non-rational powers, or is it fated to embody capitalist ideas?

I don’t think non-rationality and capitalism are necessarily mutually exclusive. Frankly, I haven't read Caliban and the Witch, so I don't know about the nuances of the ideas Federici draws up, but I guess her take regarding the defusing of occult belief is equally applicable to online spaces, to some degree.

A lot of phenomena that were only made possible via "platform capitalism" and have become literal survival mechanisms for content creators and journalists of all kinds due to the ways social media algorithms push or deboost interaction are very much understood as non-rational by many users: clickbait titles and thumbnails, Thirst traps/Algorithm Selfies, NPC-streaming on TikTok – everything sensational and easily pigeonholed, to put it briefly. At the bottom of a lot of these trends is sex or something considered equally obscene, like absurd amounts of money (flexing with it in particular), and usually a feminine, neotenous face. Two good examples would be the viral NPC-streamer Fedha Sinon, better known by her online alias Pinkydoll, and OnlyFans model and geeky hotbabe Belle Delphine – both of them have been widely successful in playing the outrage economy and monetizing the major commodity that is their image as a young, attractive woman. While this certainly has had a socio-economically empowering effect on them, it only did so because it fed right into the current, common logic of social media that is dictated by the market. And even though this is the case and the internets have made sexualised bullying or racial discrimination far easier, I believe that online spaces still play an incredible role in making marginalised voices heard, in giving them access to resources and visibility, in providing them with "space to speak to each other without limits, across borders, sharing stories and changing our reality" (Laurie Penny in Cybersexism – Sex, Gender and Power on The Internet, 2013).

What is your favourite type of social media image content?

Tough one! Definitely my flatmate’s Finsta⁴ and the hand-picked TikToks she shares with me. In general, I appreciate and enjoy pretty much anything my friends send me. It’s a love language. I’m also obsessed with any now in their mid-50s, successful contemporary artists’ Instagram. They’ve got this nonchalantly overly-eager way of posting that is so refreshing. Maybe it’s naiveté, maybe they just don’t care. Influencers for sure too, Paris-based stylists on vacation in Japan, the absurdly hyper-intellectual reels major fashion houses post to promote their latest collection and make everyone feel brainy, gym bro, and MUA⁵ content… the comical and the beautiful.