Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkácová
Capital: Magical Recipes for Love, Happiness and Health, 2006

Single-channel video installation, color, sound
12 min 17 sec


In Capital: Magical Recipes for Love, Happiness and Health, it is Das Kapital itself that is taken on the battleground. “Marx did not claim to be a fortune-teller,” Fidel Castro is to have said when proclaiming in 1961 his Marxist-Leninist affiliation and announcing the communist future of Cuba. Yet, the predictions formulated in Capital were treated with the utmost seriousness in the past century and a half, until they were taken by Chisa and Tkacova to provide them with answers on their fundamental questions in life, such as when they will marry, will they be happy with their love and their professional life, etc. They pose these questions to a fortune-teller, who answers them firstly by randomly opening Marx’ tome and asking them to read a short fragment, which is afterwards “deciphered” and continued with the help of the crystal ball.

The figure of the fortune-teller in the modern, Western society is pushed to the margins, and comes to represent a type of vanishing alternative economy reserved mostly for women (as statistics prove) and reminiscent of archaic cultures. The paradoxes of history make it that such cultures can partially be found today in the former socialist countries of eastern Europe, where the decades of embodied Marxism-Leninism were erased from memory and replaced with all sorts of beliefs: in the free market, in God or yoga, in the country’s traditions and spiritualities, not least in fortune-tellers.

While quite ironic in using the incompatibilities between the grave statements of the book, which became an object of hate in entire societies, while at the same time laying the foundations for hope to others, and the puzzling predictions of the fortune-teller, Capital draws attention to the way in which primitive methods of coping with the future are more resilient in society than scientific promises of collective emancipation. It is maybe this ambivalence that best characterizes this body of their work: Chisa and Tkacova are on the one side sharp critics of capitalist economy, and on the other side, with experience of their countries’ past, they are doubtful to the mere resuscitation of recent Utopias. – Marius Babias


Anetta Mona Chisa: *1975 in Romania I Living and working in Berlin, Germany and Prague, Czech Republic
Lucia Tkácová: *1977 in Slovakia I Living and working in Berlin, Germany and Prague, Czech Republic