| Wall |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Wall, Santiago, Chile, 2021 | ||
| Over the course of the exhibition, a worker will repeatedly construct, destroy and remake a plastered wall. At the base of the wall, a pile of residual material will accumulate as a result of this repetitive and absurd process. Imagined as a metaphor for labor, the performance invoke the continuous endeavour of generations for a wage labor, in order to sustain themselves and their families; a reflection on the bond /entanglement between bodies and labor, bodies relentlessly compelled by necessity and controlled through labour. Hannah Arendt operates this labor /work distinction and critically reformulates the way in which Marx defined labor as "man's metabolism with nature" describing the process by which "nature's material" is "adapted to man's needs by change of form" and then consumed, the two moments being assimilated to the two phases of the perpetual cycle of organic life. Work does not correspond to this natural use of the material of nature, but imagines, builds a world of objects that man can use for a longer time and that transcends individual life. The modern age (the rise of science and the political and Industrial Revolutions of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries), Arendt observes, has not produced a theory in which the concepts of animal laborans and homo faber are different, "the labor of our body and the work of our hands" being replaced by other distinct categories, productive work and unproductive work, skilled and unskilled work, physical and intellectual work. Labor, writes Arendt, referring to Locke, as well as consumption is mastered by the "necessity of existing" and when it "incorporates" and "merges" physically with what it receives from nature "it actively does what the body does in an even more intimate mode when it eats food.” Labor, through its destructive, devouring character metabolises nature and returns matter in a short time, unlike work which in turn exploits nature's matter, but in order to "change it into material" that can be processed and used once transformed into finite objects, but work through its features and its relation to time is more destructive than labor. But the stigma of labor remains the same, "uselessness" as Hannah Arendt writes, "the mark of any labor is that nothing is left behind" the effort of labor being spent almost immediately on the consumption of the body, and "all that labor produces is destined to be" absorbed almost immediately in the process of human life, and this consumption, regenerating the vital process, produces - or rather reproduces - the new "labor force necessary for the further maintenance of the body". What does sterile, unproductive labor mean and how can we imagine together another future, different from the condition of a present pervaded by the hegemony of capital and the recklessness of production? |
||