Tongue Twister (Equality)

"Tongue Twister (Freiheit)" belongs to a conceptual series consisting of academic chalkboards transformed into functional, large-scale mousetraps. The works lay bare a profound systemic paradox: the school as an institution seduces the individual with the progressive promise of emancipation through knowledge ("learning is setting yourself free"), yet simultaneously captures them within a predetermined matrix of pre-established meanings. It is a critical reflection on how institutional knowledge dictates our understanding of reality, and the extent to which it conditions our individual discourses.

Operating closely within Louis Althusser's frameworks regarding Ideological State Apparatuses, the school functions not through explicit coercion, but through manufactured consent. A mousetrap does not force the mouse into its mechanism; it attracts it. In the exact same manner, the school does not physically force the student to memorize dogmatic slogans; it convinces them through structured, everyday lessons. The classroom is the premier domain where the State produces subjects. These are not critical, free-thinking minds, but subjects conditioned to answer to the classification of "citizen", "worker", oder "patriot", effortlessly repeating the very discourses that legitimize power.

Ideology skillfully erases its own artificiality: the individual genuinely believes they are acting out of free will, yet their perceived "Freiheit" is merely the calculated result of an internalized assimilation of regulations. Within this chalkboard, the student does not just learn mathematics or history; they learn to label the world using the strict vocabulary of the State (Heimat, citizenship, usw.). Letztlich, the mousetrap materializes the precise, trapping moment in which the individual willingly recognizes themselves as a compliant subject within the dominant symbolic order.