Love Is a Free Act: Geld Automaten/ATM's in Berlin

This piece was a response to Gabrielle New's suggestion of working with the power play over how money gets put into strippers underwear in strip clubs. Rather than wanting to embody this with an actual body or my body I was interested in the removal of the body and more of a guerilla interactive installation, which in the end felt like a form of protest. 

I made the connection between the sexual connotations of putting a money card into a machine and taking money out or vice versa in a similar way to a sexual action and this way that money is put into strippers underwear. I wanted something where the connotation is taken off money or giving and taking, rather placed on this idea of giving a free message and attaching a pen with other pieces of paper so that other messages could also be written. The simple message I wrote in this version was "Love is a free act" and also in german, being Berlin "Liebe ist ein Freier Akt" so that the connection between paying for sexual intimacy be returned to a consideration of an exchange made with is based on mutual respect, rather than the dynamics or power of money exchange. 

I bought 5 pairs of white underwear and went into a combination of banks inside to their machines and left the message and also the geld automaten directly on the street in the day and at night. Particularly going into a bank to do this under cameras and past security felt as if I was engaging in some kind of illegal activity and it also felt incredibly perverse to put women's underwear over the top of money machines. I left the underwear there and have no idea how people responded. I was not willing to attempt to document from afar or risk being caught inside a bank for this.

This left me really wondering about how someone would react, a couple of men saw me doing it, one inside a bank and one in the street and they were distracted and disinterested, perhaps semi amused. I also wondered what different areas would be like, as doing this in Friedrichshain is completely different from Neukölln or Charlottenburg or Mitte in Berlin. 

It felt very subversive, definitely as if it were a protest against the selling of women's bodies for sex, associating the everyday underwear object with the everyday money machine in a metaphor for putting money or objects into women's clothing or taking them out. It was a very big question mark and the absence of body, the lack of knowing how someone would respond, somehow makes it even more detached or removed- like our consumerist culture and its economic consumption of sex and women's bodies. Direct engagement with the banking system and its all seeing eye was terrifying and I felt the outsiderness of expressing an alternative to ways of viewing the female erotic body as if i were a pervert or a criminal- very much in a Foucauldian demonstration of power particularly relating to the panopticon and self policing.