Tea and Cake. Bank Transfer as a Work of Art

During my research in Poznań, I discovered Sober Home, an association that helps addicts. It lost part of the subsidy it received in previous years. This caused issues with paying utilities and rent, and could have led to the closure of the facility. Because I wanted to put the slogan of that year’s Malta Festival – New World Order – to the test, I deliberately gave up on the visual part and transferred the entire budget for my project as a donation to Sober Home. I used this well known artistic method, to give myself an opportunity to reallocate the public money (from which most of such festivals are financed) and put myself in the position of an employee – the contactor working to fulfil the Malta Festival’s commission. I borrowed part of the work’s title from Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, whose protagonist describes the cake that melts in his mouth as follows: 

“Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs.”

Tea and Cake. Bank Transfer as a Work of Art is thus a political gesture that ascribes compassion and concern to political priorities of unquestionable importance.