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Rottenberg stages production as a delirious theatre where the supply chain becomes a bodily hallucination. Her genius is not simply “critique through humor,” but the way comedy functions as an epistemology: laughter is the trapdoor that drops the viewer into the real violence of extraction. In her worlds, commodities do not appear as finished objects; they appear as symptoms—sweat, friction, sticky fluids, repetitive gestures—evidence that value is manufactured through uneven distributions of fatigue. The set is always an architecture of coercion disguised as playful mechanics: ducts, tunnels, backrooms, modular workstations, all the spatial grammar of hidden labor.
What sharpens her work is its refusal of moral distance. Instead of presenting victims and villains, she presents systems as grotesque organisms: capitalism as metabolism, logistics as an intestinal choreography. Bodies are not metaphors; they are instruments, pressured into absurd performances that feel too funny to be true—until the recognition lands that this is precisely how contemporary work is structured: repetition, surveillance, dehumanization, and the fantasy of infinite output. Rottenberg’s comedy is not relief; it is sabotage. It breaks the spell of “normal operations” by making production legible as farce—and farce, in her hands, becomes a form of political clarity.
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