WHAT WAS I MADE FOR?

Line Finderup

The Danish artist Line Finderup revisits a familiar icon of the 1990s — the Tamagotchi — to question what it means to live, feel, and care within controlled environments.

For many, Tamagotchis were more than toys: they were our first experience of caring for digital life. These pixelated creatures beeped and blinked their needs into existence. They were a breakthrough in human evolution by inspiring, for the first time, empathy and devotion for non- organic life. They craved attention, comfort, play, food… yet their worlds were rigidly scripted, confined to strict rules and programmed routines. They were at once vulnerable and entirely controlled — a contradiction that, Finderup suggests, reflects something fundamental about our own lives.

“I see Tamagotchis as tiny mirrors of society,” she explains. “They blur the line between care and control. On the surface, they’re about affection, but beneath that, they reveal how deeply our existence is shaped by invisible structures.” The idea sharpened by her experience living in Copenhagen, where neighbours live in small apartments and pets often lack outdoor space. “Animals here depend entirely on their owners for freedom, and they’re trained to stay quiet for the sake of city life. That taming of the ‘wild’ felt connected to the Tamagotchi: a reminder that life — whether organic or digital — is constantly adjusted to fit within systems.”Through paintings, sculptures, and video, Finderup translates these ideas into figures caught between motion and constraint, activity and repetition. What begins as nostalgia for a handheld toy becomes a deeper reflection on how we are shaped by frameworks we rarely question.

The Tamagotchi, she reminds us, is more than a relic of the 90s. It is a living metaphor, whispering a bigger, unsettling question: What was I made for?