Book Presentation Elke Auer & Tea Hvala

Book Presentation, THE WHOLE WORLD IS OUR HOME and THE SPECTRE IN THE HOUSE by Elke Auer & Tea Hvala

Asma Mendoza, a 48-year-old agency worker who cleaned the giant surfaces of the Reina Sofia Museum, wrote to her daughter in the Philippines: “I have never seen anything like it. A revolution is beginning, a revolution of dignity. How I wish you were here with me.” – excerpt from the story “The Whole World Is Our Home!”

Please feel warmly invited to the presentation of two artists’ books by Elke Auer and Tea Hvala: “The Whole World is Our Home” and “The Spectre in the House”. The two companion books follow an exhibition about reproductive labour, a science-fiction story imagining a victorious feminist strike in 2058, and the very real story of that text being removed from the exhibition it was written for before the expo opened.

“The Whole World Is Our Home”, contains the story of the same name by Tea Hvala in ten languages. It tells of the consequences of a feminist strike in 2058, in the (surprisingly still alive at the time) European Union, initiated by immigrant domestic and care workers. When the masses join them, they achieve to secure universal basic income and universal and unconditional access to housing, food, water, electricity, heating, kindergartens, schools, healthcare, transport, communications and legal aid, for everybody.

The Slovenian-English book “The Spectre in the House” includes a joint introduction by both authors, the aforementioned story by Tea Hvala and its sequel, “The Chestnut Refugium”, as well as reproductions of Elke Auer’s visual works related to her exhibition on reproductive work, Das Gespenst im Haus (The Spectre in the House), which was developed for the waiting hall of the Arbeiter*innenkammer (AK) in Vienna and was on display from November 2024 until 2026. (https://kultur.arbeiterkammer.at/ak-kunstprojekte/ak-kunstprojekte-2024-elke-auer-das-gespenst-im-haus/)

Rather than treating censorship as an endpoint, the books tries to transform it into a point of departure for thinking about artistic freedom, institutional power, the material realities of cultural labour, and the persistent possibility of imagining otherwise.

The presentation will be in English.

Elke Auer (1980) was born in Graz and grew up on an apple farm. In 2005, she graduated from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since then, she has worked primarily in self-organized collaborative contexts and as a video designer and set designer in theatre. Residency grants have enabled her to work in Athens, London, Rome, São Paulo, New York and most recently in Rijeka. She has exhibited in Vienna, Graz, Salzburg, Ljubljana, Berlin, Belgrade, Bilbao, Bangkok, Krakow, São Paulo, London and Athens and curated several group exhibitions at the VBKÖ, the Association of Austrian Women Artists in Vienna. Her works engage with feminist theories and focus on the political dimensions of everyday life. She often works with found materials, language and borrowed or recycled images and motifs from (art) history. Her latest projects focus on reproductive work, vulnerability and shame, resistant tongues ​​and leaky vessels, biopolitics and hormones, as well as tensions between contemporary feminisms and masculinities. She lives with her child (born 2022) and her partner in Vienna.

Tea Hvala (1980) is a self-employed writer, translator, editor, critic, researcher, and avid reader of speculative literature, inspired by past and present feminist practices and theories. In her artistic practice, she explores both individual and collective narrative techniques. She holds BA degrees in Comparative Literature and Sociology of Culture and a MA degree in Gender Studies. In 2015, she made Discord, an artist book published by Look Back and Laugh Books. Between 2008 and 2016, she led workshops in collective writing of feminist-queer science fiction In Other Wor(l)ds. From 2019 to 2023, she led the publishing and arts education programmes of the Ljubljana-based Association for the Promotion of Women in Culture – City of Women. Between 2024 and 2025, she participated in the interdisciplinary platform Future 14b which performatively explored possible futures. She is currently co-editing The Day Before the Revolution: An Anthology of Anglo-American Feminist and Queer Science Fiction. She lives in Cerkno, Slovenia, with her nine-year-old son.