Mouth of millions of dollars

In this piece, the artist presents a collection of dental impressions of the telephone salespeople with whom she shared more than a year and a half of work in a call center (2025-2026). Alongside each impression are three pieces of information: an ID number, the amount of revenue generated for the company during the last three months, and the amount received in return as commissions. Two identification systems in direct tension: the number the institution assigns to each body, and the dental impression. Together, they form the most honest portrait the artist was able to construct of her colleagues.

The choice of the mouth as the central object of the piece is not accidental. In a call center, the voice is the quintessential work tool, and the mouth its material origin. Following Michel Foucault (1975), institutions operate by reducing the body to its function: what is not productive is not relevant. In this context, the institution does not evaluate the worker as a subject but as an instrument; as long as there is a mouth and a voice capable of generating revenue, the body has a use within the company. The dental impression, in this sense, is not just a portrait: it's an X-ray of that reduction.

The artist confesses: “In my ignorance, I thought I would need more than thirty people to reach a million dollars. To my surprise, and disappointment, I would have only needed one.”

This disproportion is neither accidental nor unique to this company. It is, as Anna Tsing (2015) points out, a structural condition of contemporary capitalism: precarity is not a side effect of the system, but one of its fundamental mechanisms. The practice of outsourcing services to Latin American or Asian countries, where labor can be acquired at a fraction of the cost, is a form of economic neocolonialism in which US companies extract value from bodies and voices that the global system deliberately places in a vulnerable position. All the companies that operated through the call center where the artist worked were American. None of the profits generated by those mouths and voices remained in the country where they were produced.

And yet, as is ingrained in the culture of the call center world, the agent complains and keeps working. Despite the dehumanization, the body returns to its post every morning. In this persistence, the artist doesn't see resignation, but rather the clearest evidence of a precarity so profound that it leaves no other option.

Bibliography:
Foucault, M. (1976). Discipline and Punish. Siglo XXI Editores. (Original work published 1975 as Surveiller et punir. Gallimard.)

Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.