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Hallelujah Diet
(color video with sound on DVD pal, 3 min. 36 sec., 2007)

The video shows an old woman reading out loud the 10 rules of the Hallelujah Diet, an absurd fusion of contemporary dieting principles with Biblical restrictions on food intake. It's inspired by devotional dieters who restrain their bodily desires in order to more easily establish familiar relationships with the divine powers controlling the world.

By revealing its relationship to Christianity, we want to get to the bottom of body obsession in the contemporary culture. Religion has been central to the cultural creation of bodies by emphasizing the importance of the flesh for portraying the spiritual. The body has become the "text", which can be read to analyze the state of the soul. In other words, the focus of secular culture on "perfect" bodies has religious roots in the Christian quest for born-again bodies. Salvation, sin and damnation are approached in somatic terms. The emphasis on slimness contains a class categorization since the Christian ideals of beauty are wed to thin white bodies and the perfect body comes at a high price. The luxury of food as well as the luxury of dieting brings forth the issues of poverty in relation to the focus on the body. If dieting (thus, the ability to stay slim) requires money, then salvation has its socioeconomic reasons and fat becomes a currency in the economies of the soul.

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