Title 
Author 
Year
Location

7000 kcal
Natalia Parandyk
2022
Warsaw 

This gigantic pile of clothes is actually not just layers of fabric, but above all a collection of stories about the bodies that once wore them. It is a pile of amulets, memories and measures of closed value in numbers that precisely define the weights and circuits of our bodies, the circuits of human existence.


The starting point for the creation of the diploma was the book by Karolina Sulej - Personal things, which tells the story of things and clothes that used to belong to people imprisoned in extermination camps, and an anonymous survey conducted among people suffering from eating disorders.

The subject of disorders itself resulted from my own experiences and willingness to deal with the scale of this deadly phenomenon, which affects nearly 70 million people around the world. Eating disorders are among the most deadly mental diseases, second only to opioid overdose. Each year, 10,200 deaths are a direct result of an eating disorder - that's exactly one death every 52 minutes.

The main subject of my considerations is the relationship between mental state, clothes and appearance, as well as the correlation of death from hunger and exhaustion, which I observed between people suffering from eating disorders and prisoners of extermination camps. Despite the impossibility of comparing these two completely different types of suffering, I felt that the identities embedded in these two distant spacetime are mutually changing desires, while maintaining a physical similarity.

The tools that I used to build the whole, I made social media, with the help of which every day I communicated with co-creators who indirectly influenced the shape of the work.

The conducted project consisted in collecting clothes and stories related to them. I obtained the aforementioned clothing thanks to publicizing the topic of eating disorders with short videos and photos in applications such as Instagram or TikTok. All the shared materials were played almost 2.5 million times, which helped me reach a huge number of people willing to participate in the project. It can be said that my work was structured by Hansen's idea of an open form, which assumes that the observer of the work directly or indirectly influences the shape of the work.