Mickey Mouse Operations, a Gift to Paul Singer /  Buenos Aires, Argentina and New York, U.S. / 2014

gloves, scraper, cookie cutter, a cookie made of dog feces, c-print photographs and video

On one neighborhood block of Calle Espinosa in Buenos Aires, Strauss collected the dog feces off the sidewalk. She then pressed the feces into a Mickey Mouse cookie cutter, cooked the pieces on an asado (a grill), brought them to the U.S. and left them in the planters on a corner of 5th Avenue in New York. This is the location of Elliot Management, the hedge fund of Paul Singer, the individual who gave the country of Argentina a predatory loan. While dog poop can be a kind of fertilizer, once cooked, it becomes inert. This project questions the politics of a gift and connects contemporary financial systems with neo-colonialism. An empty gift that has no positive impact is like lending a country money to supposedly help while charging an outrageous interest rate.

See a write up in this project in HYPERALLERIC

https://vimeo.com/149245285