Imagine Working Here: Performance, Commerce, and Moral Capital

Abstract

Imagine Working Here: Performance, Commerce, and Moral Capital is a practice-led installation project that explores how consumer culture mediates the performance of authenticity and moral aspiration in both personal and public spheres. Drawing on the performative logics of reality television and retail environments, the project examines the tension between moral intent and commercial participation—specifically within service roles, where one is simultaneously “in service” and “being served.”

Using humour, theatricality, and self-aware parody, Imagine Working Here navigates the contradictory nature of virtuosic pursuit within transitory commercial “non-places,” where desire erases time and culture, leaving only the illusion of experience. At the project’s centre is a collection of handmade souvenirs. These souvenirs, marked by mismatched references, disproportionate materials, and bathetic humour, appropriate retail aesthetics to expose the ideological operations of commercial environments and the moral ambiguity of critiquing the very systems in which one is complicit.