PRAYING FOR MY HATERS | LAUREN HURET

Praying for my Haters is a video created by artist Lauren Huret which shows, apparently, a mere recording of an urbanized building facade. Actually, it reveals what happens behind the windows of the building, constructing a complex architecture that intertwines images and voices.
We are in the Philippines, and the glass, steel, and concrete structure is the headquarters of a multinational corporation that employs workers to ‘clean’ the social environment from inappropriate content.
Violence and disgust dominate most of the images and words that these workers – content moderators – in the web industry are forced to watch, for hours, every day, exposed to psychologically disturbing images.
How do we relate to this preventive censorship, or visual and cultural rinsing, and to what allows us to access a ‘safe’ or ‘politically correct’ system of relationship and communication? Who are they and how is this ‘moderation’ of violence, aggression, and mourning carried out?
The search for a definition of the contemporary status of the image is what drives Huret’s research, and here it takes the form of a prayer, for those who remain necessarily anonymous.
Huret constructs, with a collage of narrating voices, the work routine of moderators as a path to martyrdom: gradually the anonymous urban background darkens, to leave the monolith (or mountain) of the building standing alone and totemic. What comes to life, on the contrary, are the windows, which become populated with images almost like in a contemporary Via Crucis, seemingly out of context. In fact, the Philippines are a country where the practice of Catholicism, although stemming from Spanish imposition in the 17th century, is the majority and deeply felt.
With Praying for my Haters it is narrated how the supposed, albeit perceived, freedom of the internet passes through a non-digital and artificial but entirely human, intelligent, and above all sensitive filter.

Lauren Huret (1984) is a French artist, living in Switzerland, where she studied at the Geneva School of Art and Design.
Praying for my Haters is included in the exhibition VERTIGO, curated by Urs Stahel, set up at MAST, Bologna, until June 30, 2024.

Lauren Huret
Praying for my Haters, 2019
Film still
© Lauren Huret, co-production CCS Paris & Pro Helvetia, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

02/03/2024