SODEXO HACKS

The work deals with the relation of artistic practice to social context. Where do you begin when taking up an impossibly vast task to intervene with something that is much too large to imagine, let alone understand, in its entirety? How do you approach an almost virtual (in how its whole emerges from a network of cells operating around the world) corporate citizen of the world through means that are locally accessible to almost anyone?

The introducing of negative space into the menus is an attempt to reflect the absence of critical discussion about the implications of Sodexo's presence on the Otaniemi campus. The replaced notices in the restaurant are attempts to suggest a connection between the corporation’s different branches of business. The short essay on the Dipoli poster at the main entrance is my attempt to open a discussion about corporate citizenship and also a reflection on the difficulty of doing so.

I used easily accessible tools (a scanner and a color printer), low learning curve techniques (simple graphic editing) and subtle, small scale and low intensity interventions to make my practice easily adoptable and reproducible. My abstaining from using my home language of Finnish (or more locally that of the Tampere variety) is an attempt to problematize the use of English in a (primarily non-English speaking) local context.