work
Monument
The series Monument consists of 35 photos that I took over the course of a year, between June 2024 and June 2025, all featuring the same McDonald’s advertisement.
The slogan’s message is clear: despite the increasingly bleak state of the world, you can count on the eternally enduring fast-food chain McDonald’s and its unchanging classics like the Big Mac. People come and go, wars erupt, pandemics afflict humanity, and the heat has become unbearable—yet the stage set remains intact.
What strikes me as interesting is that the slogan serves not only as a promise, but also as a surprisingly sharp analysis of the problem. Slavoj Žižek articulates it in his book Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed as follows: “According to our conventional understanding, a catastrophe occurs when the intrusion of a violent event—earthquake, war…—destroys the symbolic fiction that constitutes our reality. But perhaps it is just as much a catastrophe when reality persists and only the symbolic fiction, which maintains our access to reality, collapses.”
Applied to the advertisement, one could interpret the quote like this: the symbolic fiction we live in—whose core element is the narrative of limitless growth—has run its course. Most people know (or sense) that it offers no solutions for our present or future. Yet we continue to live in a physical reality (or move across a stage) shaped by the promises of this very symbolic fiction.
In short: our world changes, but the Big Mac remains. And perhaps it is precisely because the Big Mac (and by extension, our entire consumption and eating habits, our economic practices, etc.) has not significantly changed in decades that the state of the world is deteriorating so rapidly.