BIEN Brazil exhibition 2025
Philosophical–artistic installation presented at the BIEN Congress
This exhibition presents a philosophical–artistic inquiry into how language structures social reality, human value, and our relationship with time, work, and care. Through three essays, critical thinking questions, and short video works, Rewriting Realities examines how dominant metaphors become cultural operating systems - and how they might be rewritten.
The installation invites readers not to adopt conclusions, but to recognize the narratives they live inside, and to consider how alternative grammars of existence could support a more relational, humane, and life-sustaining society.
Time = Money
An analysis of how the metaphor TIME = MONEY emerged through industrial modernity and became embedded in bodies, institutions, and ecological destruction. Drawing on cognitive linguistics, philosophy of language, and systems thinking, this essay exposes time as a cultural construct rather than a natural law — and opens space for alternative temporal imaginaries.
Value by Being
A philosophical reflection on human worth beyond productivity, performance, and competition. This essay explores value as presence rather than achievement, difference as pattern rather than deviation, and work as expression rather than survival — grounding Unconditional Basic Income as a cultural condition for human unfolding.
Rewriting the Code: UBI as Social Healing
A systemic analysis of how domination, trauma, and extraction became encoded into cultural and economic systems — and how Unconditional Basic Income can function as social infrastructure for safety, dignity, and collective healing. UBI is presented not as charity or policy fix, but as a foundational condition for a relational society.
VIDEOS on YOUTUBE
The videos accompany the essays by extending their questions into a visual register, offering a sensory reflection on language, abstraction, and human worth.
Het Onvoorwaardelijk Basisinkomen
Menselijkheid als fundament: hoe basisinkomen, traumasensitiviteit en non-dualiteit een nieuwe wereld mogelijk maken.
Humanity as the foundation: how basic income, trauma sensitivity and nonduality make a new world possible.
Life in a Word of UBI by Mabel
Imagine a world rooted in trust, healing, and unconditional basic income.
What’s your vision?
Send me your video and let’s dream aloud together.
Critical Thinking Journey
Invitation
We invite you to go deeper.
Take the ideas from these essays as a starting point, not an endpoint.
Use them to question your own assumptions, explore your own thinking, and imagine the world you most want to live in.
What would a society look like where everyone truly belongs?
How could unconditional basic income help bring that vision to life?
Reflect. Dream. Write your most envisioned possible reality.
Your authentic voice matters.
You are welcome to collaborate with ChatGPT or any other tools that help clarify your thoughts. What matters is that your vision is true to you.
Send your essay to Rewriting Realities.
Together, I hope to create a living collection of essays that I will seek to publish, weaving many voices into a shared imagination of the future.
Alienation is a Linguistic Crisis
- What dominant metaphors or sayings shape how you think about time, work, and worth?
- Can you recall a moment when the story you lived by no longer felt true?
- How does the metaphor “Time = Money” influence how you value yourself or others?
- Where in your life do you feel pressure to perform rather than simply live?
- How might changing the metaphors we use (for time, work, value) shift how we relate to each other and the Earth?
Value by Being
- What parts of yourself have you hidden because they don’t seem “productive”?
- How does your body respond when you imagine unconditional support — safety without conditions?
- What would work look like if it were an expression of who you are, rather than a means of survival?
- What kind of cultural conditions (trust, rest, safety) would allow you to unfold into your potential?
- How would it change your relationships if difference (sensitivity, neurodivergence, etc.) was fully honored?
Rewriting the Code: UBI is Social Healing
- How do you see the wounds of history - colonization, patriarchy, exploitation - still shaping the systems and communities you live in?
- What would a society built on safety, care, and unconditional belonging look like in practice?
- If trauma is not only personal but collective, what kinds of policies or cultural shifts could help heal it across generations?
- Which cultural “codes” (beliefs or narratives about worth, survival, and success) feel most urgent to rewrite?
- If unconditional support like UBI were guaranteed, what new forms of work, care, or creativity could emerge in your community?
- How can you personally participate in rewriting the cultural story: in your family, workplace, or society at large?
- What would it feel like, in your body, to belong to a culture that truly honors difference and interdependence?
A Living Story
"What we call the future
is already being shaped by the words we choose today.
Reality isn’t something fixed or outside of us.
It unfolds as we speak.
We do not enter time.
We are time, dreaming itself forward.
There is no future.
Only the rhythm of now,
forever rewriting itself
through us."
Rewriting Realities is my life’s work : a weaving of art, language, and social imagination.
It begins with a simple truth: the stories and metaphors we live by shape the world we create.
For too long, our culture has run on an unconscious code:
ideas like separation, scarcity, and time is money.
These metaphysics are not neutral.
They have led to alienation, ecological collapse, and a world where worth is made conditional.
I am motivated to create change because I care deeply for humanity, the Earth, the cosmos, and LIFE itself.
Rewriting Realities is my contribution to that care.
Through essays, exhibitions, and campaigns, I explore how our cultural code can be rewritten into living stories of connection, stories where:
The Earth is alive.
Value flows from being, not earning.
Human dignity is unconditional.
At the heart of this work is the call for unconditional basic income, not just as an economic policy, but as an expression of trust, belonging, and our shared aliveness.
This project is not just for me.
It is an offering, a seedbed for collective imagination.
An invitation to heal the cultural trauma beneath our systems and to craft a society where everyone can thrive.
Because you are.
Value by Being.
About Rewriting Realities
Imagining a New Society
Rewriting Realities is an interdisciplinary and visionary project by Mabel Mauritz - artist, philosopher, and writer.
It weaves together art, language, and social imagination to rewrite the dominant stories and metaphors shaping our world.
From a trauma-informed, non-dual, and philosophical perspective, Rewriting Realities brings forth essays, exhibitions, lectures, and creative campaigns that build bridges between art, science, and social innovation.
Its focus includes themes such as:
Unconditional basic income as an expression of human dignity
Trust and collaboration as the foundation of a healthy society
A new metaphysics for a new society: seeing life - humanity, Earth, and cosmos - as alive and interconnected
This project arises from the Art & Basic Income working group of Vereniging Basisinkomen.
As a debuting artist and creative entrepreneur, I aim to collaborate with others who want to help shape a new society and grow this work together.