The word ‘statistic’ comes from the Latin ‘status’ (state) and designates the collection and presentation of quantitative data of interest to the state. The antagonist of statistics would be that which is in the domain of idiocy, after all, ‘idiot’, from the Greek Ïδιoς, idiótes, originally meant a ‘private person or private citizen’ — someone alienated from the public life of the polis who would thereby reveal a lack of interest in the State.

Statistics and indexes have an ‘accelerationist’ component, a flattening of metrics that aims to increase any given productivity. The organizing and zero-degree that statistics supposedly stand for ends up being a free zone where correlation, causality, inference, prediction, and probability interconnect and compete to empower certain discursive structures of sovereignty. Big data companies collect and capitalize data and indexes and propel monophasic ways of seeing the world that are atomized into algorithms based on our digital footprint: this practice is based on a model of extraction that is in line with the modality of the Anthropocene in which we live, the Capitalocene
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In an article from The Guardian entitled ‘Can the high heel index predict economic growth?”, Trevor Davis, a former consumer product specialist at IBM, coined a theory that links the length of high heel to economic fluctuations. Following a computational analysis of billions of social media posts by crossing references from digital influencers and consumers where a specific heel height on shoes and boots, such as ‘four centimeters’ or a sentence easily equated to a height, an index was reached. This index mapped by correlating a variety of economic performance indicators revealed that when these economic indicators fall, the height of the heel initially rises, but if the economy remains in a state of recession for more than a few months the height of the heel tends to fall. The period between 2008 and 2009 of full economic crisis was the most glaring and illustrative of this theory, with heel heights between 12 and 20 centimeters. This conclusion seems to be somewhat anecdotal and if we put any faith whatsoever in this narrative then the high heels, a capital symbol of private ownership and particular taste, take on a disproportionate dimension and begin to reflect the entire economic capacity of a nation at a given moment.

This installation called ‘Damnational’ is comprised of two modules alongside each other. On the first one we notice a half-kitsch ceramic column that gives way to a thin metal structure that stretches to accommodate a pair of high-heeled shoes made of polyester from which small flags are raised in hyperbolic heels working as flagpoles.

Following this line of thought the flag on the heel would be a major offense to the fatherland and its machinations. Flags tend to promote the use of neck muscle and under the heel of a shoe the flag is of no use, since it doesn’t ooze authority nor gets the visibility needed for a totalizing feeling of belonging of a nationalistic kind. What is close to the ground and what one stomps holds no decisive authority or tendency to be sovereign. But here miniaturized shoe-flags are displayed on a pedestal and that creates an antagonistic vector of forces.

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