Lecture: 'It is very difficult to be an island of perfection in a sea of misery, but please, do not doubt our sincerity'

Parasitos contains two old Greek words: being close, beside (para) to food (sitos). Before becoming a creepy creature or swear word – the way we know it now – it used to be a person who offered his company and interesting conversation in exchange for food, harking back to some very primordial notions of hosting and guesting. In fact, the parasitos was not so much an unwanted guest as a precursor of the court jester, troubadour and hobo, introducing influences from abroad, digesting all the left-overs that nobody wanted.

True to the spirit of the ancient parasite this Studium Generale will invite every semester an artist who has just experienced a wild host-guest situation during their artist-in-residency, in which they were close to the foreign meal and are left to digest the surplus.

Simon Wald-Lasowski was resident at the Institute for Provocation in Bejing this year and supported by the Mondriaan Foundation. In this lecture he will recount his exuberant, sometimes nauseating research into the world’s biggest sample market, the digital underworld of Chinese kitsch, the popular culture’s leftovers on which his artistic practice feeds.

Simon Wald-Lasowski (Paris, France, 1980) collects, studies and mocks the iconography of images, objects and signs that are so prevalent in contemporary society. Simultaneously, his multiform practice conveys a genuine love for disdained tacky gadgets and obscene curiosities, which he obsessively hoards. Objects become actors in satirical subversive installations which confront viewers to absurd issues of the human condition and to the enormous underbelly of our morbid consumerism. Having worked for 12 years as a photographer Simon embraced a multiform practice in 2017 during his residency at the Jan Van Eyck Academie.

Installation in reaction to Simon Wald-Lasowski's lecture

Artwork by Toran Wolstencroft:

‘In this work I constructed a mobile of parasites (assemblage of found images of micro-parasites with metropolitan city scapes and logos of corporations which I regard to be extremely "parasitic" in the world). This merging of the micro scale parasites with the gargantuan scale of today's man made infrastructure, allows us to meditate on our own activities as both parasites and hosts, profiters and tax-payers.

The mobile structure is similar to mobiles which are fastened above children's cribs; underneath I installed a bed as to elaborate on the hovering imminent threat of the parasitic corporations that drive unsustainable development in the world.’