“The Whole World is made to pass through the STRAW of the Culture industry”

“The Whole World is made to pass through the STRAW of the Culture industry”

Installation, straws, 240 x 400 x 0.5 cm. 2013/2022

In this installation, I work with plastic straws—one of the most disposable, fragile objects of consumer culture. I connect hundreds of straws end-to-end to form a single, elongated body that symbolizes the global capitalist system’s continuous flow and dependence.

One end of this body originates in the Southeast of the world, winds its way through borders, weaving them into its form, and travels upward and westward—eventually ending at the furthest Northwestern point. This trajectory alludes to the exploitative dynamic between the Global South and the Global North.

While the straws may initially evoke oil, gas, or resource pipelines, this work also refers to the less visible yet equally invasive pipeline of the culture industry. At this point, the piece gestures toward Theodor Adorno, borrowing its title from his well-known phrase:“The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry.”

Here, I consciously alter Adorno’s “filter” into a “straw.”A straw does not merely filter — it sucks, homogenizes, absorbs. It is both a passage and a tool of consumption. This shift from filter to straw humorously but critically reclaims the metaphor and places it within a tactile, contemporary material context.

The world map constructed from ephemeral, colorful straws reflects the banality of economic exploitation, while simultaneously visualizing the networks of pipelines and geopolitical interdependencies that define global capitalist exchange.