Andrea Zittel How to Live? — DOP

Andrea Zittel
How to Live?

June 24 2025

Andrea Zittel (born 1965) is an American artist whose work revolves around investigative living, isolation, and the ways in which design shapes our everyday experience. At the heart of her practice lies a philosophical quest I can deeply relate to: What do we really need? — in terms of the spaces we live in, the people around us, the things we wear, the objects we use? What are the essentials that best facilitate a life well lived?

She regularly updates a quasi-manifesto titled These things I know for sure — offering a distilled insight into her life’s principles.

Since the early 1990s, Zittel has developed a body of work that includes self-sufficient living units, experiments in clothing as uniform, dishless dining tables, and large-scale environments like A–Z West, her ongoing project in the California desert. From spending extended periods in sensory-isolated spaces to building a manmade island in the Baltic Sea, her projects use self-imposed boundaries and radical simplification to probe the conditions of modern life.

What makes us feel liberated is not total freedom, but rather living in a set of limitations that we have created and prescribed for ourselves.Andrea Zittel

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