‘Domestic Muscle: Lessons in Anabolism amid Turbo Horror’ looks at the flux of capital in a northern district of Bucharest’s periphery. Pipera, once a village, was turned into an industrial platform during communism, and has since rapidly evolved into a hyper-corporate business district and one of Romania’s wealthiest enclaves.
This installation reveals how global capital is performed locally, and points to a wider cultural condition. Power operates culturally before it becomes economic, and the persistent internalisation of a Western gaze upon our own histories enables for economical conditions where corporations can extract value through skilled, yet cheap labour and favourable taxation. The capital generated in the periphery exits the country, raising the question: what does it mean for a seemingly modern district to reproduce power asymmetries, remaking itself into a simulacrum of the West, while remaining structurally marginal?
The installation is centred around two main streets in Pipera, where economies converge: former factories, metro infrastructure, corporate headquarters, and construction sites, forming a fragmented landscape in which accumulated value circulates through bodies and materials, ultimately leaving the country.
