Émilie Pitoiset

So Much Tenderness

Jun 13, 2025 – Jul 26, 2025

• 

You enter the room, and you immediately notice it: a plushy, human-sized rabbit. With its pink nose, pristine white fur and prim blue waistcoat, it is the epitome of a Victorian fairytale character. After a closer look, the posture itself betrays a residual fatigue. It is well-hidden behind an overall poised composure, but you would spot these signs anywhere. The bunny displays the unmistakable slump of service employees worldwide. Any gig-worker, micro-tasker, side-hustler, digital serf and delivery-rider knows this all too well. At the end of your shift, limbs will get limp as eyes start burning. Rabbits-for-hire and furry mascots are no exception.

So Much Tenderness is Emilie Pitoiset’s fifth show at Klemm’s. For over a decade, the French artist has built an embodied taxonomy of the biopolitical ailments of modern capitalism, from the slumping, starved and self-exploitative marathon dancers of the Great Depression[1] to the pill-popping, sleepwalking and terminally exhausted salarymen from Japan’s Lost Decades and beyond[2]. In Berlin, the Pitoiset shifts her lens from individual bodies to contemporary society’s manufactured sheath at large. Here, Pitoiset presents a series of new works: the mascot costume and a sound piece voicing its inner musings, latex masks for breathplay tending towards self-induced asphyxiation, and three photo-collages materializing the rippling of soundwaves against adhesive tape from inside the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy. The show itself adopts the vantage point of the camouflaged, toiling subjects underneath it all: it is now us who are trapped inside their heads as we look out on an otherwise saccharine, libidinal, and at times regressive world.

Pitoiset, who thinks of So Much Tenderness as the first chapter of a wider investigation – an eponymous movie will be produced next – has been researching professional mascots for over a year. The franchised characters are usually meant to generate attachment towards a brand, a team or a territory. They also come with specific labour conditions. These literal TaskRabbits are licensed service providers in a highly competitive, ultra-deregulated work sector. But who really pays attention to the human behind the brand, the worker under the polyester fur? The first-person monologue which voices the bittersweet fortunes and misfortunes of the lone bunny worker echoes throughout the space. Its soothing tone is female sounding, thus recalling centuries of gendered care work up to our own digital assistants.

« The future of work is not coding but caring – more high-touch than high-tech[3] », write Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek in the opening pages of After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time. In their 2023 study, the philosophers examine the history of socially reproductive work over the past century. They emphasize that the future of work in advanced capitalist countries will not lead to fully automated nanny and nurse-bots, but that healthcare, education, food service and social work already account for most low-wage job growth. Emilie Pitoiset’s own investigation into invisible social labour positions itself at the telling crossroads between care and entertainment. It is a sweet, sweaty wonderful world; one where heatstroke, dehydration, lower back pain, UTIs and potential suffocation epitomize the dark underbelly of affective capitalism.

Ingrid Luquet-Gad

[1] Pitoiset has explored dance marathons since 2009. See for instance: Emilie Pitoiset: MANIAC, 11.09-24.20.2020, Klemm’s, Berlin.
[2] Emilie PItoiset: Slumber Poppies, 09.05 – 13.06.2025, Haus N, Athens.
[3] Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek, After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time. London; New York: Verso, 2023, p.11.

• 

• 

• 

• 

•