This could be you

- 73.630,67€

I am Sandra Hauser, CEO and founding artist of the UBD Group. Throughout the 43 years of my sublime life, I collected the beautiful number of -73.630,67 € of debts.

I never bought capitalistic objects like a car, fashion, or jewellery with the loans I took. Mostly, I bought with them time and freedom. The time to do art, the freedom to not come home when staying abroad and living there till the next itinerance. I also bought the excuse not to be straight, to live a borderless life for myself and borderless towards others. I bought the feeling of being successful, nice clothes, and, above all, material for my artworks. Sometimes I paid with my loans for the endless hours in which I couldn’t work due to being there for my alcoholic other and cleaning behind her the dysfunctional chaos an addiction leaves behind. I also paid for the 8 implants and countless teeth and jawbone operations I needed due to psychosomatic pain – no one found the cause. I bought time to recover from burnouts. I also somehow bought my freelance activity.

Years and years of my career as an artist, I was ashamed of my debt situation. I was ashamed that I couldn’t afford the petrol to drive to a dinner at a collector's house. I was afraid to talk about my debts and tried to hide my situation because I thought it would be “unsuccessful”.

When one day, again, my art was more courageous than me. I found an image – a huge mountain of ropes from the port of Marseille – in the hills behind my house where I am living. When I first saw this huge mountain of chaotic knots, I knew this would be the place to work on my debts. So I did. And so they became my artistic material. In my solo show “1 Split Second” at La Traverse in Marseille, I opened the total sum of my debts to the curator, gallerist, and the public.

Since then, the weight of the sum is not heavy anymore. It became my force. My work. My art. My success. This is why I created this rubrique. To give people the chance to come out with their debts. To be straight about it. To talk about this beautiful yet ugly trap a lot of us fall into.

To make Minus a Plus.

Sandra Hauser, CEO UBD Group