labour

In addition to her theoretical work, academic and researcher Eleonora Belfiore has a particular interest in socially engaged arts practice. In this sector, she plays a crucial role in highlighting the labor injustices promoted and reinforced by decades of neoliberal policies and argues for demanding an overall improvement in working conditions in a sector traditionally undervalued by funders and policymakers. Her work, mostly focusing on the UK context, often challenges the assumptions underlying cultural value —and questions the methods used to evaluate cultural impact, in an attempt to bridge the gap between cultural theory and practical policy-making. In this podcast, we talk to Eleonora Belfiore about self-exploitation, value metrics, austerity, social change, community development, feminist ethics of care and cognitive dissonance.

In this podcast, researcher, curator, and organizer Vaida Stepanovaitė guides us through some of the intricate lineages of past and present trade unions in the post-Soviet Baltic states, while also drawing inspiration from international movements such as the Art Workers’ Coalition and W.A.G.E., as well as from recent collective efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic. She reflects on the devaluation of labour and people within the context of “uber-economics” or the gig economy, on the toll, precarity takes on the tired bodies of workers, and on the need for radical action to foster new forms of collectivization. The struggle against inhospitable working conditions and the gaps in the social safety net affecting art workers, serves as a starting point for devising better models for arts institutions and building new solidarities in the quest for a good life.

Ingrid Guardiola is an essayist, filmmaker and arts manager whose career has been marked by the unwavering desire to question the structures that condition the way we see, feel and live: from visual culture to the production dynamics of arts institutions, by way of the changing ways in which we live and work. Her latest essay, La servidumbre de los protocolos (The Servitude of Protocols), looks at the underlying paradigms that shape contemporary life, unpacking the devices that govern our gestures, our time, and our interactions, under the banner of efficiency, surveillance and saturation. In this podcast, we talk to Ingrid about mutualism, symbols, and rituals, about the limits of cultural institutionalism, and about the cracks that make room for resistance. And we consider the possibility of thinking and feeling outside the boundaries imposed by the techno-bureaucratic apparatus.

In this podcast, we talk to artist and feral economist Kate Rich about administration, entrepreneurship and feral vocabularies. We consider the cycles of learning and unlearning required to open up the imaginary of cooperation and business, and access their enduring emotional content. We recap experiences of shared bank accounts, economic abstractions as temporary hiding places, greyness as camouflage or cover, and acknowledge administrative practice as the inevitable soundtrack of our lives that is waiting to be reimagined.