Dialogue on anger
collettivoSERRA on 99% by Lada Uchaeva
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«Such hyper-meritocratic, Western-centric justifications of inequality demonstrate the irrepressible human need to make sense of social inequality, at times in ways that stretch credulity.» [1]
Lada Uchaeva works with this tension, making visible what dominant structures legitimize, normalize, and conceal. In a society marked by multiple forms of oppression, the artist identifies economic inequality as a cross-cutting condition that structures access to power, protection, and dignity. Without excluding other dimensions of social violence, this perspective reveals how they often take root in a shared material foundation.
Uchaeva’s work is neither didactic nor an abstract denunciation. 99% is a symbolic device that triggers a collective awareness long subdued—namely, that power is not distributed equally, that institutions do not guarantee equal rights for everyone, and that violence—often invisible—operates through the economy as much as through repression. The table at the center of the installation is a plastic reproduction of real-world hierarchy; the heap of waste around it represents what is excessive and discarded. Our exclusion is not a side effect, but a structural function of the system. A system sustained by the brutality with which protests are suppressed, by the impunity granted to certain powers, and by the imposition of extractive economic models that tie the survival of a few to the poverty of many. From the new “security” laws—like those recently introduced in Italy, which punish protestors and criminalize dissent—to global economies that perpetuate neocolonial relations, control is increasingly exercised over bodies and movement, shrinking the space for dissent.
99% rejects the idea of inequality as a natural condition, showing instead how it is built and maintained by a normative structure that legitimizes the wealth and violence of the 1% at the expense of the many. The economic order is not neutral: it imposes categories, determines what has value, and decides who is worth listening to. Within this framework, even individual worth is reformulated: not based on who one is, but on how much one can produce, consume, or perform. Those who fail to meet these criteria are excluded; those who challenge them are silenced.
In this context, anger is not an impulsive reaction but a conscious political stance that opens the possibility of alliance. In a reality where adaptation is imposed as a condition for survival and silence as a form of obedience, declaring oneself angry is already a form of rupture. Uchaeva, however, does not idealize this anger nor attribute to it a redemptive function. She sees it rather as a relational force, a possibility for mutual recognition. It does not transform, but it connects; and in this recognition, perhaps, the first crack appears in the structure upholding the dominant order.
Uchaeva draws from historical practices of resistance: the reclamation of marginal materials, the subversion of authoritarian symbols, the transformation of repressive tools into critical language. The baton-cutlery, barbed wire roses, waste, and metal fencing do not merely create an aesthetic rupture; they expose the rhetoric of privilege and reveal its brutality. It is an aesthetic that denounces opulence not as an achievement but as an abuse. The viewer is called upon to recognize their own position within this social architecture, to assess their distance (or proximity) to the table from which power is distributed. This is not a matter of guilt, but of acknowledging that injustice is not a deviation from the system, it is its scaffolding. And in this context, silence becomes assent.
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Recommended reading: Piketty, T. (2020). Capital and Ideology; Graeber, D. (2019). Bullshit jobs; https://www.contrapoints.com/transcripts/opulence
[1] Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), 36. ​