Cats of the World, 2020) is about the placebo effect of all the sweet or “cute” images that relieve the monotony of our daily lives. However, what the spectators gazing raptly at those kittens of the world don’t know is where the image came from. To find out, they will have to step back, zoom out, exit the architectural shell of the C3A and strain their eyes to see another image made up of tiny dots: the image of a crowd gathered in a square. Tete Álvarez effects a somewhat sacrilegious, albeit pertinent, subversion by replacing each dot or pixel, every individual person’s head, with the image of a
cute kitty found online, primarily on Instagram. Displaying domestic animals, our pets, generates micro affect; it elicits the “likes” which, quantified by the sum of interactions and algorithms, drive the invisible economy of the symbolic that now dominates our world. It is the power of the cutesy. Peio Aguirre