Activity name: Inventions for Radio: A Series of Podzines on Working Conditions
Total number of artists: 9
Audience: 1850 (Audience Open Studios opening night).
The workshop, organized by researcher and educator Pablo Martinez and artist Jose Salas, invited artists whose work and research is rooted in social and community-based practices: Chad Cordeiro, Fransisca Angela, Hamo Salein, Elke Uitenthuis, Ramia Suleiman, Wes Mapes and Ratu Saraswati.
During the workshop, participants experimented with different approaches to embodied archiving practices to collectively think of their relationship with working conditions in art. Inspired by the work of the English composer of electronic music Delia Ann Derbyshire and her collaboration with Barry Bermange for the BBC Third Program, participants engaged in sound collage exercises on day 1, and connecting with writing, listening and storytelling on day 2, they approached the forms of production in the field of contemporary art. The resulting audios from this workshop were shared during the Rijksakademie Open Studios Exhibition, where audience could engage with the resulting pieces, during the live streaming facilitated by Reza Afisina.
This set of practices aims to reveal some of the procedures of institutional mechanics and their violence against workers. Participants experimented with the voices and sounds of violence and dispossession, while also embracing possible alternatives for imagining a more democratic, plural and vitally sustainable creative landscape:
“Those of us who work in the field of art have witnessed the transformations that the art institution has undergone in recent years. We are artists, educators, librarians, editors, cleaners, curatorial assistants, researchers… who live in big cities that expel us because our salaries are not enough to pay the rents. We have worked as interns, as freelancers, intermittently, sometimes for free and on many other occasions barely covering expenses. The programmed instability of institutionalised precariousness has for years been continually shaken by financial crises, pandemics and budget cuts. We live balancing on a wire without a net. The fiction that career success, or mere survival, depends on individual talent is much more intense in the field of art than in other productive sectors. The historical construction of the artist as an autonomous entity, disinterested and detached from his or her material needs, has produced an erasure of class that prevents us from discerning the origins of both artists and, by extension, cultural workers and, therefore, the extent to which they need remuneration to subsist. Through this erasure of class and the invisibilisation of the material conditions of the agents involved, inequalities in the art system are perpetuated. The fiction of meritocracy creates the mirage of equal opportunities, when in fact it serves as an alibi to justify structural inequality. The possibilities of access to the world of creation are profoundly unequal in terms of class. “