Everything Must Go is inspired by the increase of shoplifting since the introduction of self-checkouts. How did you come upon this and what do you find so interesting about it?

It started from the observation that stealing has become less of a problem for people around me. In fact, quite a few people have a problem with paying. And very specifically, it started rolling when a friend came to my house for a dinner party with a piece of parmesan and said “I nicked that for you.”

When I asked why he had done that, he turned the question around: why not? Why do you pay for things? So we got into a conversation about the right to sell and how, in the current era, you give someone – or a big-box retailer in this case, Albert Heijn – the right to determine from its de facto monopoly position how much money it charges for the things that keep us alive. He argued that we need to take a critical look at who we pay money to for what we eat and what systems we maintain by doing so. He peppered his argument with more and less valid arguments, activating my thinking about property relations and how you can or even should undermine them.

After that dinner, I felt the need to talk to more activist shoplifters, and so I came into contact with a large group of people for whom it is no problem at all to steal. Even more than in the theft itself, I became interested in the underlying sentiment. Everything Must Go became a diagnosis of our life in late capitalism: how we feel about the economic environment we are in, and how that feeling ultimately guides our behaviour. In the group I spoke to, I saw political awareness but also a lot of cynicism and nihilism. In a disenchanted society, there are more and more people with fluid morals. Many people do not feel comfortable with the current economic environment, but are also unable to change it. This then leads to a kind of wild beating around the bush. Which manifests itself, among other things, in shoplifting.

How do you get in contact with activist shoplifters?

Very quickly.

I posted a call on Instagram and within a day I had 24 people eager to talk about this. I made a suggestion to them to chat anonymously, but nine out of ten had no problem doing so by name. These also had a sense of pride about their own kleptomaniacal behavior.

Some thieves show clear awareness of the order they like to disrupt: In the free market we give a few companies the right to determine how products come to us, and to charge as much money as they want for it. How they ever obtained that power, who gets to share in the profits and what harm they do is not up for debate. The activist thieves have lost hope of political solution; for them, theft is a necessary sabotage of the system. They say: you can stand on the Malieveld with your protest sign, but that won’t stop capitalism. The only way to communicate with the system is to destroy it from within, your shopping cart is a Trojan horse; the more you misappropriate, the bigger the gesture.

That made me sad, that people now feel so disempowered in relation to that economic environment that all they think they can do is repeat the evil aspects of the system. They see the dubious actions of institutions and companies, but are unable to change them. The free market has penetrated their existence too deeply for that. They feel like a tiny ant, all they can do is reproduce evil. In doing so, you also reinforce an essentially corrupt system.

But I also see myself in that feeling of powerlessness: I feel how deeply the greed, the opportunism is connected to late capitalism, and then see few ways to escape from it. If the population no longer has confidence in or understanding for the ever-growing multinationals that hand over products to us on their terms, then something is going seriously wrong. At the same time, I also find stealing intellectually lazy. So besides understanding, I also kept my distance from it.

So the work is not a celebration of stealing, but also looks at it critically. Where is that tension between stealing as an activist act or, on the contrary, using activism to justify stealing?

The protagonist moves between those positions.

There are two alternating performers, Isadora Tomasi and Annica Muller. In a kind of interior monologue, they answer the question ‘Why should I pay?’ The performance presents a sampling of motivations drawn from the interviews I had with these 24 thieves. Arguments of the pathological shoplifter alternate with those of the self-proclaimed Robin Hoods and those of the hobbyist thief who puts stuff in her bag mainly for the thrill. The thinking of people who run out of money at the end of the month is interspersed with that of capitalist rats who straighten out their behavior with a shaky little philosophy. The decision-making power lies with you as the viewer, but this alternation makes it damned hard to determine your position.

The installation works as a panopticon. You move around the outside of a replica of a section of an Albert Heijn grocery store, equipped with a large number of security cameras. Monitors around the installation give a view of the performance. You could say that the viewer is watching the suspicious subject like a surveillant. Perhaps you connect partly with the thief and partly with the security agency. You switch between the two. Do you identify with her, or with those trying to protect the legal framework? Or are you a confessor, just listening and not feeling called to a moral position?

With my works, I hope to manifest problems: they don’t give an unequivocal answer, I like them to nag for a while. As a viewer, you circle around the figure and therefore her thinking, and you could do that for quite a long time. I won’t send you out of the room. So yeah, are the figure’s actions activist or does that activism really just function as a sham? I leave that to the audience.

In any case, what I hope to dislodge is the obviousness of payment. For many of the shoplifters I spoke to, that payment is no longer obvious. They say: the transaction of money is a dogma, we have to stop conforming and question that payment critically. In much of our behaviour we repeat that of our parents or our grandparents, but the world is changing. My grandmother knew nothing about financialised robot capitalism. She bought her tomatoes from a small farmer in the village.

Now, the distance between consumer and provider has increased tremendously. The available food is in the hands of an ever smaller group of increasingly wealthy corporations. Their actions, the activist shoplifter reasons, are driven primarily by shareholder interest. Profits are not shared with the tomato pickers, if they have not yet been replaced by robots. It’s not that Jumbo and Albert Heijn want to provide us with affordable fair food, they want to keep the financiers happy. But only when we think the supermarket cares about ús, will we give it our trust and money. And so the company disguises its opportunism with a lot of amiable cozyness. Feigned innocence is a central concept in late capitalism. We see it in stores with nonsensical sustainability claims, but we also see it in slick politicians who have no active memory of wrongdoings. The remarkable thing is that the shoplifter acts exactly that way: only when you can lie credibly do you become a successful thief. With the right appearance and a convincing story, you can smooth talk the employee at the self-checkout and avoid a fine. So the high earners not only teach us to be selfish, they also teach us to hide our opportunism. Image building is crucial.

Some put a piece of ginger in their purse without punishment, but selfishness also takes larger forms. In prison, I visited the “Utrecht coffee thief,” a man with a debt of 90,000 euros in stolen goods, especially coffee. He was now in prison for the sixth time. Stories like this also made me a little wistful. I saw how less fortunate people paid the price for the behaviour that multinationals get away with.

In Everything Must Go, we see the performer moving through the installation in a Snow White dress. You can connect a lot of symbolic meanings with Snow White. Why did you choose this dress?

First of all, I wanted to make her unrecognisable, to give her a certain abstraction, preventing the viewer from attributing the behaviour to particular personality traits. The figure had to be a model for society at large. Through a pig mask and the costume, she becomes an ambiguous figure. She is eager, greedy, instinct-driven – animalistic you might say – but with a fairytale facade. The costume may give the work an allegorical quality, but what mattered to me most was the cynicism, the gigantic contrast with the underlying despair. We are thundering towards climate catastrophe at full speed, but pretending that with a green sticker left and right we can avert disaster. Without those fairytales, the business model of many successful companies stagnates.

Snow White’s innocence also clashes with the sensual performance, in which the protagonist says shoplifting makes her horny. Is that clash also something you deliberately sought out?

The sexual energy has to do with the animalistic, with the instinctive. As humans, we are not rational beings. We try to balance the part of us that is driven by lust with the rational being. The unrestrained animal must be corrected, we learn that in school, from our parents and from the law. And then there are still the phantoms of Christianity hanging around. I myself was raised Catholic, and my thinking about right and wrong was once based on what was in the Bible. But that virtuousness, of course, only holds up if it is reciprocal, if we can trust that everyone is trying to do the right thing.


When you see the planet going to hell and the Elon Musks making tons of money off of it, it becomes a lot harder to rein in your selfish tendencies. We see an economy that grows at the expense of the planet, at the expense of future generations and people in the Global South. Social relations are coming under increasing pressure. Just try to maintain that that is not theft.

I can’t deny that part of me is also animalistic and instinctive, driven by lust principles. If we become masters at showing our innocent face – and I think we are getting better and better at that in the present age – then something is smoldering. The division between our day and night version becomes pressing: in everyday life on the street, as well as on social media and in our work environment, we try to come across as thoughtful, virtuous, attractive people. As the pressure to look good gets stronger, so does this need to act out. We see this in the voting booth, in the techno club restroom and at the self-checkout. People cast a protest vote, disobediently snort a line of coke, steal a protein bar. You can’t really call it reclaiming power, rather it feels adolescent; it shows the need for agency.

Several shoplifting tactics are mentioned during the performance. Have you tried a few yourself?

Yes indeed. I am adventurous, and during the interviews I became quite inspired by the experienced shoplifters. I wanted to put my money where my mouth was, so I took a little from time to time. As those shoplifters said: once you’ve seen the back-end, the moment you know what’s going on in the wings, it’s very hard to go back to the stage. The moment you know the rot, it’s hard to ignore it.

But like I said: I also find stealing intellectually lazy. And I ultimately refuse to manifest myself as a capitalist rat. Stealing feels like I’m further accelerating the rot. So I also stopped doing it. These days I do more of my shopping at the market, I grow the parsley on my balcony.

In 2021, your video installation Guilty Landscapes / episode IV was part of the IMPAKT festival exhibition Modern Love. Both works play with the tension of watching and being watched. What do you find interesting about this tension?

A work often has its origins in encounters with people who act outside of the daylight: sex workers, shoplifters, happy drug users, etc. In Guilty Landscapes, you think you are watching a pre-recorded video of a go-go boy in Thailand, a boy working in the sex industry there. But then there comes a moment when that person sees you and you become aware that you are in contact through the internet. I wanted to mess with the idea of video as a one-way street. When we imagine that we are concerned with the suffering in the world, it gives us a sense of power. But when the other looks back and it is not at all evident that they are suffering, you have to start rethinking your position of power.

The internet has an upload and a download. With this I mean: in addition to getting information about all kinds of places in the world, for example the Global South, those people can also see how we look. Having that view returned lets you see past your implicit assumptions. Perhaps there is an analogy to opening up a conversation with a shoplifter. To me, it’s always about opening a door that was closed before.

In 2015 you wrote about the dewerelddraaitdoorisering (‘talkshowification’) of the art world: the development in which the cultural sector increasingly feels compelled to justify itself for fear of being dismissed as an elitist hobby or left-wing intellectual fuss. This is a theme that the IMPAKT Festival 2024: DEAL WITH IT is also addressing. How do you view the role of the dewerelddraaitdoorisering of the art world now?

I had forgotten that one myself, thanks for reminding me. We may have to invent a new term?

That selling and touting of art with fashionable terms still happens, we still think we have to defend ourselves for our messy quests. What I’ve seen a lot of in recent years is art that aims for the ‘good,’ if not from the work itself at least from the accompanying texts on the wall. Don’t get me wrong; there is never enough activism. What I am talking about is virtue as a pose, the suggestion that something becomes a better work of art when there is an external purpose involved. Sorry, but that’s a huge narrowing of the art domain; I never went to the academy to be a good person. Then I get happier from a painting of a hard dick.

If we put up too much readable, virtuous art the art field becomes predictable and didactic, ‘ticking the boxes’ art you get. Yawn. I prefer to see materialisations of pain and discomfort. When a work makes us seriously angry, we encounter so much truth about who we are, about what we consider right and desirable, about where our wounds lie. With Enjoy Poverty by Renzo Martens, many viewers had that, or with Christoph Büchel’s refugee boat, but these are exceptions and it did not make them popular. The negative is under pressure, we are swimming in positivity these days.

And god, how we all want to be well understood and lecture each other. Sometimes I think the systems that direct us are now so powerful and unreachable that they install a general feeling of helplessness. We get our little bit of agency only from the reprimands we can give each other. We no longer know who is responsible for the capitalist menace; that is the air we breathe. And so we focus on what we can still change, a journalist’s choice of words or I don’t know what. That’s important too, but it’s out of all proportion to the actual problem.

For me, the dewerelddraaitdoorisering of art was also about the bite-sized chunks of marketing. I like the suspension of the understandable explanation. Do we still dare to feel communally insecure? The moment you are confronted with nervousness, I think: yes, maintain that nervousness and please keep it as long as possible. I do get warmed up by the motto of this year’s festival: DEAL WITH IT. It approaches me with aggression, which is a good start.