Ngepet

This work emerges from concerns about a labor system that forces many people to place their hopes for survival in employment. Inspired by the Indonesian folk practice of ngepet, the pig and the candle serve as symbols of the relationship between hope and power. The candle represents the hope that gives people light to keep moving forward. Yet when employment becomes their only means of survival, those who control access to work also gain the power to extinguish that hope. This work questions the inequalities within a system that allows one person's future to be taken away by another's decision.