Free Lunch, ice, kosher hot dogs - 2020

Free Lunch is an ice sculpture that confronts the adage ‘There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”, popularized by science fiction author Robert Heinlein and referred to by conservative economist Milton Friedman as the “core” of free-market economics.

The phrase presupposes that we agree to a truism that we only get what we pay for, and anything that appears to be free will exact its cost upon us later by some means. Essentially, each individual is a business with a ledger book and if we don’t consciously keep it balanced, we’ll be unpleasantly surprised when the inevitable audit comes.  

Free Lunch (as documented in a time-lapse video) was created for the opening credits of the pilot episode of Days, an artist-written and produced soap opera playing among Berlin’s precariat, described by the project’s instigators, Ellinor Aurora Aasgard and Zayne Armstrong as “a relatively new social class drawn together by the false promises of neoliberalism.” Many members of Berlin’s precariat came here because of the perception that the city could be the locus of a ‘Free Lunch’, a life lived without checking a balance sheet of your contribution toward capital, a utopian promise of bounty through community. Speaking literally, Berlin had the highest density of left-alternative Vokü’s; free lunches (or more often dinners) ostensibly open to all comers.

What we have been witnessing over the past decade is the melting away of this vision of a utopian Berlin (whether the vision was ever borne out in reality is another question) as real-estate speculation and rising rents necessitate a higher degree of hustle. But rather than acquiesce that the bill for Berlin’s Free Lunch has finally arrived, we can see that the city, through its collective creative labor, has been stockpiling plenty of Free Lunch not to be shared among itself, but to be funneled to investors now that the time is ripe.