Motion / Labour / Machinery playfully and speculatively explored angles for a critical reflection on notions of labour and the city, from micro to macro level. The exhibition was curated by Manuel Segade, in collaboration with Mariette Dölle and Jesse van Oosten of TENT.
Rotterdam as a case study
Rotterdam is a perfect case study of a late capitalist city where the constant movement of people and goods in the port has created a dynamic economy. The port was once the dominant image of Rotterdam: with its ships, docks and workers – sweating, toiling and hoisting, captured by iconic photographers such as Cas Oorthuys, Ben van Meerendonk and Robert de Hartogh. Over the past sixty years, Rotterdam has gradually changed from an industrial city into a recreational city that attracts more tourists than ever, partly thanks to contemporary architectural icons such as the Markthal.
Art and labor
Art has a difficult relationship with labor. Art has often been described as an artistic drive that goes beyond what duty and labor demand of us, and as incomparable to work because it cannot be captured within the usual frameworks of work. But now that the boundaries between intellectual and immaterial labor and manual labor are gradually disappearing, artistic labor is increasingly being seen as representative of the functioning of society as a whole. This raises new questions about the role of the artist in society and the political dimension of art. How is labor represented in the world of art today? What is the current status of artistic production? What is work?
The exhibition brought together artistic views on issues surrounding 'work' and the 'subjectivities' that arise from it, while also addressing what it means to work as an artist today.
About the artists
Mercedes Azpilicueta explored the social soundscape of Rotterdam in a video installation, taking the performance work of futurist artist Valentine de Saint-Point as a starting point. She used spoken language as a medium to clarify how social, economic and political identities are constructed in everyday language.
The collective Informal Strategies (Doris Denekamp & Geert van Mil) took the herbarium of socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg as a starting point. Even during her political imprisonment, Luxemburg collected plants. By taking a series of walks and collecting plants around an Amazon distribution center in Leipzig, the artists linked Luxemburg’s walking habits to the daily work of local workers.
Carme Nogueira presented 'Rotterdamweg', the first in a series of research and performance projects on how European industrial cities transformed into post-industrial cities. Nohueira approached the urban space as a fabric of micro-stories from the past. She made these stories visible in the streets of the city by means of posters, and she entered into a dialogue with passers-by.
Charlotte Schleiffert put together a wall collage of small, politically engaged drawings on subjects such as intolerance, power, oppression and poverty, which she made over the years in various places. The work formed a compressed retrospective on global working conditions.
Anna Maria Łuczak linked observations about the post-Fordist city with behind-the-scenes footage from a report she was commissioned by a local TV station about Polish migrant workers in the Netherlands, in order to introduce the seasonal workers to the residents. Many of the conversations Łuczak had with the workers were not used in the TV documentary.
Fotini Gouseti often focuses on the fear of the uncertain, the indefinable, which she believes has led to an ideology that forms the basis of our society. She made a work about testing the air raid siren, which sounds in the Netherlands every first Monday of the month at 12 noon. The air raid siren has not had to function as a real alarm signal for more than fifty years.
Fran Meana based itself on the concrete reliefs left behind by a curious pedagogical program in a mining town in the north of Spain. The relief plates are filled with geometric motifs to familiarize the local workers and their children with the principles of geography, grammar and geometry. These relief images are one of the few material traces of the transition from an industrial to an information economy, a new labor regime.
Artist Marc Roig Blesa and graphic designer Rogier Delfos have been creating Worker Magazine, a series of publications on labor and the function of photography in society. At TENT, Werker Magazine presented the ongoing project 'Young Worker Camera': an archive presentation of more than 500 images that represent the relationship between young people and labor. Werker Magazine also organized a number of workshops according to the methodology of the Worker-Photography Movement, which originated in Germany in the 1920s and then spread across Europe, America and Japan.
The exhibition was made possible in part by Acción Cultural Española.