Living Room Extravaganza -The Banquet of Indifference

Gold leaf frames the apocalypse. In this second instalment of Living Room Extravaganza, the fantasy of separation collapses entirely. A couple, dressed in bridal whites and imperial smugness, recline in their palatial salon — crystal flutes in hand, velvet underfoot, chandeliers above — while Gaza starves right in front of them. Not metaphorically. Literally. The ruin is no longer on the screen. It is the view.

The scene outside their salon windows is not just destruction — it is starvation, displacement, surveillance, and grief. Rows of human beings, wrapped in blankets, shiver through dust-thick air beneath bombed-out towers. A red-hooded child stands at the vanishing point, not pleading, but witnessing. Staring. The look is not accusatory. It’s worse — it’s tired.

And yet, the couple toasts. As if nothing were happening. As if this were simply another evening in the golden age of forgetting.

The Banquet of Indifference cuts deeper than irony. It exposes a world where atrocity and affluence not only coexist — they lean on each other. The famine outside props up the fantasy inside. The destruction of Gaza, flattened and filtered, becomes an aesthetic backdrop. The war is real. The room is curated. The two worlds share the same air, and yet never touch.

This is no allegory. It is documentation of the grotesque moment we inhabit — a time where people literally starve to death in front of gilded walls, and the response is a polite sip of champagne.

There is no fourth wall left to break. You are already inside.