I see myself from above: I am lying on a sofa and wearing a lazybones. It is cozy, warm, and has beautiful patterns in blue, green, and white. I want to touch it with my hand, but the little mushroom heads escape me. I lie on the sofa and wait… wait until I become something. But I can’t open the window because the mold needs a certain level of humidity to grow. And so I lie there and wait until I become something—maybe penicillin, salami, or camembert.
The performance deals with the history of laziness—a moral concept that only becomes visible in relation to work. You are not lazy when you do something, but when you don’t do something.
In her solo performance, artist Arnita Jaunsubrēna explores her own productivity, which has declined due to chronic illness. In the spirit of lecture performance, she confronts shame and social expectations. She tells personal stories and examines workaholics in her own family, talks about mold and compost, and examines the state’s compulsion to work. In the end, she finds refuge in the tranquility of sloths.
Where do we find room for mistakes, breaks, and change in Western work culture?
almost good (LV/DE) is Arnita Jaunsubrēna’s solo collective. The artist lives in Berlin, studied in independent Latvia, and grew up in Latvia in the 1980s, when it was part of the Soviet Union. Arni has been living in Berlin since 2015, and almost good was founded in early 2023 as an attempt to understand art as a process in which perfection is not the top priority. With almost good, Arnita Jaunsubrēna wants to encourage herself not to give up art as a profession just because she is chronically ill and has to find new ways of working to cope with her illness and the resulting disabilities.
