Dates: June 26 - June 28, 2014
Places: Hangar and Espacio Nyam Nyam, Barcelona
Artists and participants: Maja Bekan, Harun Farocki, Marianne Flotron, Claudia Pages Rabal and Anna Pahissa (múltiplos)
Credits image: “Weekend art: hallelujah the hill”, 1996-2000 Aleksandar Battista Ilic (in collaboration with Ivana Keser & Tomislav Gotovac).
"You are never not supposed to be working" is the second episode of “Bodies at Work”, an on-going project by Angela Serino and Maja Bekan. This episode was developed by Angela Serino as part of the curator-in-residency program at BAR project, Barcelona, from April till June 2014.
“You are never not supposed to be working” presents a series of artworks and interventions where pressure of mindfulness described by Sarat Maharaj is made visible and is at play in specific situations and at different places of work: from the open space offices of the glass buildings of large corporations, to the new co-working tables used by self-employed cultural workers and even in the domestic spaces of a living room turned into a temporary office. As we will see the dynamics and the reasons for instigating or implicitly expecting such presence of mind in these spaces of work are various and different, and those differences are very telling. The public presentation will be the occasion to trace and discuss them together.
“Bodies at Work” is a collaborative research project by Maja Bekan and Angela Serino examining and voicing what kind(s) of “work” it is that art and cultural workers do. What is their relationship to time and space, how and for whom they work, how they balance their private, social and professional life, and what are the advantages and pitfalls of such circumstances. It consists of small-scale performances, film screenings, lectures, conversations and printed materials. The first part of the project took place in Beijing, China in 2013 with the kind support of Mondriaan Fonds and IFP, Institute for Provocation Beijing.
Program:
Thursday 26 June, 6pm, Hangar, Barcelona.
The Ghost in the Factory
Introduction by curator Angela Serino
Act(s) on the table / Actos sobre la mesa performance by artist Claudia Pages Rabal
A table: that was once a frustrated work, that wants to become a co-working table but ends up being a pretext for an (im)possible love story among two, three, four or more characters who are busy seeking/choosing the potential of the “we” either as a disinterested common or as an advantageous new business model. This work was especially developed for “You are never not supposed to be working”.
Work, Marianne Flotron, video (2011), 44 min
The artist invited the Columbian Theater of Oppressed’s director Hector Aristizábal to work for one week in the insurance company in the Netherlands. He set up a forum theater play (a form of the Theatre of Oppressed) at the company’s premises helped by several actors and employees of the company. In the contemporary labor society where most of the subjects identify themselves over work, “Work” is emphasizing the way the capitalistic economy is forming behaviour and influencing mentality by employing knowledge of social science.
A New Product, Harun Farocki, documentary (2012), 36 min
Farocki immersed himself for one year in the world of QT, Quickborner Team, a business consultancy from Hamburg that specializes in the optimization of workspaces within the knowledge industry. He followed their meetings and their attempts to develop a new consultancy product. The result is a compelling portray of how design of human labour and spaces for human labour are conceived and discussed in corporate business culture. In the words of the author, “the film shows that words are not just tools, they have become an object of speculation.”
Saturday 28 June, 12am, NyamNyam, Barcelona
Dentro y fuera. Permanecer o escapar como estrategias para la supervivencia / Staying or leaving as strategies to survive
“Dentro y fuera” is a journey through images and texts from artists’ publications compiled by curator Angela Serino and múltiplos’ founder and director Anna Pahissa to describe what happens in between the walls of a house, around a kitchen table or in a living room turned into a studio office when the anxieties and pressure of (over)productivity generated by their professions shake their life and desires and temptations to steal time, find ways of disappearing or leaving the house permanently start to appear surreptitiously in their heads.
