In this piece from HERSOID’s new series Despondency, the tone shifts—but the critical acuity remains razor-sharp. Gone are the algorithmic overlays and biometric identifiers of Working Under Surveillance. Here, the violence is quieter, more intimate. We see a solitary figure curled into herself, crouched low, boots planted, arms wrapped around her knees, face half-hidden behind a drooping fringe and an exhausted forearm. It’s not so much a portrait as a pose of surrender.
The medium—pencil and wash on what appears to be folded kraft paper—heightens the vulnerability. The creases in the paper read like old scars, or bureaucratic filings folded and forgotten. The colour palette—muted pinks and flesh tones sinking into the grainy brown of the paper—feels both tender and bruised. This isn’t simply a study in sadness; it’s a depiction of a particular kind of emotional attrition: the slow crush of inheriting a broken world.
Thematically, Despondency continues HERSOID’s investigation into power and agency, but now the gaze turns inward. Where earlier works exposed systems of control—facial recognition, datafication, surveillance capitalism—this series explores the psychological toll those systems (and others: ecological collapse, economic precarity, digital overstimulation) exact on younger generations. The absence of technological motifs here doesn’t contradict HERSOID’s usual themes; it deepens them. The system doesn’t need to be visible to be oppressive—it has already seeped into the interior life.
And if we follow HERSOID’s recurring interest in literature (especially Borges), this piece hums with echoes of The Library of Babel or The Garden of Forking Paths—texts haunted by infinity, paralysis, and the absurdity of choice in systems too vast to comprehend. The figure’s crouch suggests a kind of existential refusal, not unlike Bartleby’s: “I would prefer not to.” But it also evokes Kafka—bureaucratic despair, the crushing ambiguity of a world you didn’t ask to be born into and can’t meaningfully change.
Yet what makes this image sing is its restraint. It doesn’t dramatize rage or scream apocalypse. It whispers resignation. The anger has happened already—what’s left is its aftermath: numbness, posture, silence.
In this way, Despondency might be HERSOID’s most haunting work yet—not because it shows us what power does, but what it leaves behind.
