PLEASE SELECT YOUR LABEL
- Jun 19
- 2 min read
PLEASE SELECT YOUR LABEL
Participatory Digital Work, 2026
Please Select Your Label examines the distance between the identities society assigns to us and the personas we construct in response to them.
The work presents participants with a list of social labels drawn from different areas of life: gender, age, appearance, family structure, class, profession, health, sexuality, belief, political position, social status and belonging. The categories are deliberately placed side by side without hierarchy. “Artist” appears within the same system as “unemployed person”; “wealthy person” alongside “poor person”; “very attractive woman” alongside “person considered unattractive”; “divorced woman,” “immigrant,” “academic,” “single mother,” “conservative,” “queer person,” “old money,” “disabled person.” Different forms of identity, circumstance, privilege and stigma are reduced to the same linguistic structure: a label.
The participant is asked:
“Select the label you believe society has assigned to you.”
But the selection is only the beginning of the work.
A second question follows:
“What price have you paid throughout your life to maintain the persona you created in order not to appear as someone who carries that label?”
At this point, the work shifts from classification to performance.
A social label does not merely describe a person. It can produce expectations about how that person should look, behave, speak, succeed, fail, desire, parent, work, age or belong. Once such expectations are internalised, identity can become something that must continually be managed. A person may construct an alternative image of themselves, consciously or unconsciously, in order to resist the meaning attached to a category.
The work is concerned with the cost of maintaining that distance.
That cost may take the form of silence, achievement, beauty, conformity, rebellion, humour, ambition, self-control, consumption, invisibility or constant self-explanation. What appears from the outside as personality may therefore also contain strategies of defence. The persona becomes both protection and burden.
Please Select Your Label does not attempt to determine whether any label is true or false. Nor does it establish which identities are more legitimate, painful or privileged than others. Instead, it asks what happens when a human life is compressed into a category, and what a person subsequently does with that category.
The list itself functions as part of the work. By placing socially charged identities beside apparently ordinary descriptions, the work removes the usual hierarchy between them and exposes the classificatory impulse itself. The participant may recognise a label immediately, reject several, hesitate between them, feel uncomfortable with the available choices, or discover that the category they carry is absent.
For this reason, the list ends with:
“Other: ______”
followed by:
“If your label is not listed, write it down. Society probably already has.”
The work does not end with the artist's statement. It is completed through the participant's act of recognition, resistance and response. The screen becomes a temporary site of confrontation between the social gaze and the constructed self.
In Please Select Your Label, the artwork is therefore not the list of labels itself.
The artwork occurs in the moment a person chooses one, and is forced to consider what they have built in order to survive its meaning.
Interactive version:
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