That Figures: Selected Writings

K-HOLE founder Dena Yago's essays and illustrations blend the conceptual with the cartoonish in her analysis of late-stage capitalism and its visual culture

This collection of writings by artist and cultural critic Dena Yago, founder of K-HOLE, retraces more than a decade of reflections on the creative economy, its lures and failures, as well as many other topics such as AirSpace, Billie Eilish, LARPing, free food, ketamine, Elliot Smith, murals, precariat, poetry and the internet. Yago's writing dares to dig into the contradictions of lives under the sugarcoated deals of the attention economy. Absorbing but refusing to metabolize the language of corporate culture, Yago opens spaces where critical thinking can still happen in spite of the pressure imposed by the numbing and accelerating effects of too-late capitalism. Parallel to her writing, Yago's art combines conceptual legacies with cartoon elements, creating a poetics of highly relatable memes, without giving in to the cynical or the blas .