Artist Müller Eva

Class anxiety

My project is a Social thriller in form of Comic book. I am planning a story, that deals with class and gender opression. To augment these instances of opression in society, I want to use elements of suspense and horror. The setting of the book plays a big role. It is set in a garden plot colony at the edges of Hamburg, one of the richest cities in Germany with a huge gap between the rich and poor. In the beginning of the 19th century these garden colonies were build to counteract hunger and poverty. Later on these gardens were still mostly rented by the working class, who lived in small apartments inside dense multi-storey apartment buildings in the cities. Recently gentrification also found its way into these garden colonies. They prieces of the garden parcels climb up. More and more parcels are now occupied by young urban professionals and upper white middleclass. During the Covid 19 pandemic this process got even boosted. The working class gets expelled. In my book a woman, Sara, is invited by an old friend to a birthday party in a garden colony on the edges of Hamburg. Sara is an artist and not very succesfull, measured by the standards of our capitalist society. The old friend, Emma, who she knows from kindergarden times, is now a succesfull hip urban professional with a picture book family. The party is full of Emmas picture book friends. Sara knows no one there, except her girlfriend, Djamila, that she brought to the party. In the course of the day a horror situation for Sara and Djamila arises there. The horror consinst mainly of sexism, homophobia and class differences. At the moment I am in the midst of finishing a book, so this project is new. At the residency I can still immediately start drawing, because during this year I want to do a lot of research and writing for "Class Anxiety". The book will be aproximatel between 150 and 250 pages long. I want to use the time of the residency to define the style of the book and draw the first chapters.