The Ant Colony
The Hell of Sameness
2025
The Ant Colony - The Hell of Sameness
Various sizes
Ceramic
2025
There is no other in an ant colony. There are only roles. From birth, each ant is assigned a function, and individuality has little place within a system built on order, efficiency, and the survival of the colony.
What about human society?
Although we often celebrate diversity and inclusion, those who fall outside established norms are still easily categorised, excluded, or turned into "the other." Educational systems privilege particular languages and ways of thinking, while legal and administrative structures often treat those beyond their boundaries as exceptions. Difference is tolerated only when it fits within an existing framework.
Using ants as a metaphor, this work reflects on how collective systems quietly reproduce these mechanisms of exclusion. The more a society prioritises uniformity, efficiency, and stability, the less room remains for difference to exist.
Byung-Chul Han describes this condition as "the hell of sameness." A world without the other may appear orderly and free from conflict, but it also risks becoming a closed system where genuine encounter, transformation, and new possibilities gradually disappear.