The Institute of Auto-Ethnography of the Middle Classes
The Institute of Auto-Ethnography is a strategic, performative framework for documentary-based research art. Primarily using time based media, the practice extends to photography, text, and, at times, to screenings, events, and possible publications. The term “Institute” is deliberately playful: it is not an official institution, yet it can theoretically be inhabited by others who engage with the same approach. It functions as both observational and diagnostic, naming and situating an ongoing body of work while framing a vision for research into cultural production and societal norms.
Auto-ethnography, as practiced here, begins from the maker’s positioning while looping personal reflection back into structural observation. The private is political: subjective experience is treated not as confession, but as material through which broader societal mechanisms become visible.
The Institute operates from a condition of ambivalence. In a cultural moment increasingly oriented toward clear answers, legible positions, and moral certainty, ambivalence is understood as an ethical stance rather than a lack of commitment. It allows contradictory positions to coexist and resists the resolution of tension into didactic conclusions. Following Hannah Arendt’s insistence that seemingly good intentions can lead to harmful outcomes through chains of unforeseen effects, the work refuses moral clarity as a substitute for analysis. Ambivalence demands endurance from the viewer: a willingness to remain within discomfort, implication, and uncertainty. In doing so, it denies the cultural elite the comfort of moral innocence and resists practices that allow audiences to take themselves out of the picture.
The Institute focuses on the middle classes not as an economic category, but as the class that shapes society through everyday micro-decisions: what is seen, what is allowed, what is produced aesthetically and culturally. Taste and lifestyle are the primary tools of analysis, understood as mechanisms that reproduce power, inclusion, and exclusion. While references to “taste terrorism” are metaphorical, they point to real processes through which cultural judgment enforces social hierarchies and maintains the status quo.
Alongside its function as a conceptual framework, the Institute will also take more public forms. These can include screenings, gatherings, or publications that extend the work into shared spaces.
Auto-ethnography, as practiced here, begins from the maker’s positioning while looping personal reflection back into structural observation. The private is political: subjective experience is treated not as confession, but as material through which broader societal mechanisms become visible.
The Institute operates from a condition of ambivalence. In a cultural moment increasingly oriented toward clear answers, legible positions, and moral certainty, ambivalence is understood as an ethical stance rather than a lack of commitment. It allows contradictory positions to coexist and resists the resolution of tension into didactic conclusions. Following Hannah Arendt’s insistence that seemingly good intentions can lead to harmful outcomes through chains of unforeseen effects, the work refuses moral clarity as a substitute for analysis. Ambivalence demands endurance from the viewer: a willingness to remain within discomfort, implication, and uncertainty. In doing so, it denies the cultural elite the comfort of moral innocence and resists practices that allow audiences to take themselves out of the picture.
The Institute focuses on the middle classes not as an economic category, but as the class that shapes society through everyday micro-decisions: what is seen, what is allowed, what is produced aesthetically and culturally. Taste and lifestyle are the primary tools of analysis, understood as mechanisms that reproduce power, inclusion, and exclusion. While references to “taste terrorism” are metaphorical, they point to real processes through which cultural judgment enforces social hierarchies and maintains the status quo.
Alongside its function as a conceptual framework, the Institute will also take more public forms. These can include screenings, gatherings, or publications that extend the work into shared spaces.
"The greatest and most damning intellectual and political failure of the Left may be the failure to recognize cultural capital not only as a socially effective form of power but also as a form of domination, not only substantively, in its particular forms, but also structurally and relationally, in its distributions and through the social differences and hierarchies that it articulates and performs. While the myopic focus on the 1 % may be effective symbolically, it not only lets the remaining 99% off the hook but also reduces social power to economic wealth lodged in a single, one-dimensional dominant class." Andrea Fraser