Andrea
Catherine
Steves




Let It Return



“Should the headdress return, it will be an incredible precedent, a mess of all devils, the museums will become empty.”

-Wilfred Seipel, Executive Director of the Kunsthistorischen Museums, July 1996


Let It Return! (working title) is a publication and exhibition edited by Essential Services (Andrea Steves & Enar De Dios Rodriguez) that deals with the pillage, plunder, and public exhibition of cultural artifacts by various institutions throughout history. The project includes texts and artistic interventions which explore various possibilities, speculations, and frictions of repatriations in the present and future, gesturing towards reparations, reclamation, and justice.


The publication was the winner of the 2021 Emerging Concepts publication award from PrivatePrint and will be released in early 2024.




Essential Services is a Vienna-based atelier founded in 2020 by visual artists and cultural workers Enar de Dios Rodríguez and Andrea Steves dedicated to essential problems, and problems of essentiality, in art and beyond.

Projects, Current / Recent

Artist Books & Edited Volumes

Collaborations:
FICTILIS (2010-present)

as Artist Project Group (Bernhard Garnicnig, Lukas Heistinger, Andrea Steves, 2020-present)

as Museum of Capitalism (2014-present)
Agnes: unfolding strategies of resistance and joy

anti-nuclear & environmental work
Articles and Podcasts
sound work
some press and interviews:
  1. ︎︎︎100 Works of Art that Defined the Decade (Artnet)
  2. ︎︎︎Building A Museum of Capitalism (NYT)
  3. ︎︎︎What Would A Museum of Capitalism Look Like? (New Yorker)
  4. ︎︎︎Così l’arte contemporanea mette in scena la crisi (Irene Opezzo, La Stampa)
  5. ︎︎︎This New Museum Imagines a World Where Capitalism Is Dead (Sarah Burke for Artsy)
  6. ︎︎︎A Time-Twisting Visit to the Museum of Capitalism (Atlas Obscura)
  7. ︎︎︎Which Stories Belong In Public? Monument Lab ReGen Advisory Roundtable
  8. ︎︎︎A View From the Edge of the Earth (interview for The Chart)

in the words of others