working conditions

In a country like Spain, where rural areas have historically been subject to dispossession and marginalisation, Jose’s work reveals the ravages of extractivism, from lithium mining to solar panel monocultures. He links these practices to historical processes of conquest, latifundism, and the privatisation of the countryside, while also exploring the ways in which communities resist and seek to build alternatives. In this podcast, Jose Iglesias García-Arenal invites us to imagine interstices of possibility where community resistance, historical memories, and art come together to redefine how we inhabit the world. We talk about invented traditions, olive trees, sheep, looms, and the complex interactions between past, present and future.

In this podcast, we speak with Zarina Muhammad, who walks us through The White Pube’s collaborative process and projects to date. We delve into Zarina’s diasporic identity and the politics of assimilation, as well as polyvocal narratives and fiction as critique. We explore the embodied experience of writing their first book, Poor Artists, and ask why a bingo card can sometimes say more than a press release

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.