There is a story about a meatball which comes out of nowhere, hitting some people’s heads and changing their lives forever. There is a mouse that gets caught while trying to find a cheesy snack. There has been a 100% increase in the cost of rent in Berlin in the past 10 years and no increase in my wages. A bag full of basmati rice. A teacher stuck at work waiting for students stuck at work. There is the price one pays to purchase organic underwear so that their intimate parts are not stifled from nine hours in the office chair. There are 10 missed calls from my mother. There are places to which one cannot return and cities where it is impossible to live. There are fertility treatments that send fish oil straight into the veins two days before and two days after ovulation. The feeling of a needle in the middle of the uterus, which could be due to pregnancy, or due to fear. There is a Master’s thesis which is no Master’s thesis. There is a book that was not intended to be published, that was not intended to be read.

Eva Ďurovec works as a software tester 40 hours per week and studies art at the same time. There are not enough hours in the day to complete everything, to comply with everything. And then there is also her desire to have children. The question: how can all of this be reconciled within the profession of artist? Ďurovec investigates the possibilities that arise from different class formats, and asks what we produce and reproduce—with our bodies, through our routines, trapped between the recurring desires and cruelties of daily life. She writes about forgotten dreams, social orders, and fantasizes about what kinds of new models for living together might be conceivable.

With an epilogue by Alice Creischer: For me, it is not a diary, as Eva calls it, but an almanac […] that describes the counter- forces that prevent us from suffocating in the face of power. They are the desires and projections that, in this fragile life, tenaciously resist a pull that can be called normalisation. […] All labour relations, whether on the assembly line or in front of the PC, are only part of an exploitation that affects the whole of life and obliterates all projections. The almanac reports on this totality and how it becomes concrete in the everyday life of looking for a flat, wanting children, chronic illnesses and their treatment, relationships and friends. It also reports on the deep need for a spiritual asylum on the run from totality. The asylum lies in the knowledge of a historical continuity of thought and action that is always superior to exploitation. It exposes — often seemingly with ease and as if in a game or joke — the power of exploitation as incapable of creating meaning, as a machine.