Total Work

by Montse Romaní /

TOTAL WORK (1)

The socio-political events of 1968 caused an impact in the West, thanks to the liberation movements, which brought with them an understanding of the particularity, the difference and the specificity of the social and intellectual aspects that have defined postmodern thought. These changes have been projected into the dynamics of post-industrial society through the consolidation of service industries, on the one hand, and the application and use of new communication technologies, on the other. Within the sphere of production, the Fordist model, traditionally linked to the factory structure, to the assembly line, and determined by fixed units of time, place and action, has been succeeded by what is known as “immaterial work”, which appears as the node in the recent production/consumption relation.

The post-Fordist production model implies, then, that the traditional division between productive and reproductive work, between exchange-value and use-value, has undergone a process of flexibilisation, causing most of the capacities, until recently considered as pertaining solely to our private apace ad our time, to now become directly productive factors.

This redefinition of the concept of work has been analysed from the perspectives of different critical theories, including feminism which has assimilated it into “female work”. Thus, the affective, relational, creative, cognitive and symbolic qualities, which had been characteristic of reproductive activities carried out above all by women, are now a vital part of the productive process and increasingly demanded of the workforce.

To these developments, which have taken place in the global economy in past decades, we must add the welfare crisis and the privatisation of public services, increased unemployment and the resulting migratory flow. All this has accelerated the process of precarisation among citizens, submitted to a working system characterised by flexible working hours, temporary contracts, extensive workdays, work at home, unpaid holidays, and so on. These working conditions have led to a modification and a reinforcement of already existing social and economic hierarchies that have particularly affected those groups which are least favoured, most notably women, one of the most hard hit collectives.

The exhibition proposal that we present under the title Total Work offers a reflection on the shift from material work to immaterial work (although both still coexist and need each other) within the context of economic globalisation. It focuses its analysis on two processes: the feminisation of the workforce, a historical phenomenon that has grown in recent decades in response to labour deregulation, and the feminisation of poverty, which appears to find its most visible face in what are known as “alternative global circuits”-often transnational territories – but also in the big cities as a consequence of new market conditions.

Furthermore, as a topic secondary to the central thrust of this project, we include a discussion that addresses the sphere of artistic production, the qualities of which have also been reappropiated and made profitable by the capitalist market.

Thus, as cultural producers devoted to the construction and criticism of representation, and no strangers to job precariousness, we consider it to be of vital importance to place ourselves within the production system, to know what our situation is as consumers and as generators of symbolic and economic gains. Out of this conviction, Total Work approaches precariousness as a territory for investigation and as a way of life. Not as victimisation, exclusion or isolation, but rather as a place of political action and collective structuralisation.

We therefore propose a parallel reading of certain feminist discourses and strategies of representation so as to develop a politisation of our practice through symbolic production. This will help us to reveal other forms of visibility and resistance to what has been termed “female social precariousness”.

The proposals by Maria Ruido and Ursula Biemann from different perspectives (local and transnational) and approximations, and beyond mere documentation of a given reality, enter the labour world to produce, through word and image, a counter-geography of precariousness based on histories and subjective experiences.

Hence Biemann sets out a mapping of the sex trade in the information era, which incorporates gender, ethnicity and class variables, to explore, through different female voices, the routes these women follow towards transnational spaces, their conditions of life and work. Maria Ruido examines the conditions of immaterial work and the experience of precariousness in our lives, by reviewing, on the one hand, the antagonistic strategies of image production, and on the other, certain modes and spaces for self-management of groups of women striving for a transformation of labour conditions, inasmuch as they constitute venues for new forms of collective sociality and production.

Total Work has opted to exhibit a breakdown of the oeuvre of each artist which materialises through a dual process of induction and deduction. While Biemann follows a reorganisation process based on the deconstruction of her own filmed material in order to create a proposal that she has termed “World Sex Work Archive” –in other words a file assembled from interviews with different women, female sex workers and activists (partially show in Total Work)-, Maria Ruido combines different media (texts, films, slides and interviews) accumulated in the months leading up to the exhibition and those that she will add during the two months of its duration, using appropriation and register to underscore, through a subjective narration, the possibility of a plural history generated by personal experiences.

In this way, we have employed the archive as a method of ordering and organising knowledge and reality, so as to politically rethink and reorganise certain visual and conceptual orders. We could speak of a counter-archive as an open, dismountable, subjective and partial device, one that advances and rewinds –as a work involving a continuum of memory and re-elaboration demands- which is revealed as a potential way of establishing other more complex forms of representation of reality and other relation modes between the author and producer, on the one hand, and the visiting public on the other, which would reduce the distances existing between the two.

Total Work is set out in a discursive way based on a dynamic relation among artists, materials and their interaction with space, plus those elements that the different participating agents will contribute with their talks and presentations in the course of the exhibition. Thus, tools are suggested to the spectator for a critical reading, providing the means for him/her to appropriate this setting of work onwork.

(1)An exhibition (Barcelona, October 15 – December 7, 2003) curated by Montse Romaní in collaboration with artists Maria Ruido and Ursula Biemann.

About Writer: Montse Romani is a cultural producer based in Barcelona (Spain), with a major focus on curating and writing. She has worked extensively in the fields of post-Fordist work-conditions, self-organized cultural practices, the transformations of urban spaces, and visual culture. She was curator of several exhibitions, including Non Place Urban Realm (1999), Imaginando Identidades [Imagining Identities], (2000), Memòria Urbana i Espectacle [Urban Memory and the Spectacle] (2001), Total Work (2003), Tour-isms. The Defeat of Dissent (with Núria Enguita and Jorge Luis Marzo) (2004), What the hell does music have to do with industry and feminism in an art centre? (with Laurence Rassel/Constant) (2005). As a programmer, she collaborates with the International Women’s Film Festival, Barcelona since 2003. Is member of the artist group El Sueño Colectivo [The Collective Dream], with which she produced the video-essay Work Narratives (2005).

Yeni Film, No. 16, Nov. 2008