Contemporary society is built upon the understanding of labor as a necessity, and that the more one produces, the better living one can afford. This illusion has come to dictate our ways of life, relationships, ideas, dreams, and nightmares to the extent that the hunt for profit appears as inescapable. However, as labor has become omnipresent through an escalted amount of technological tools, we do not find ourselves more prosperous; we increasingly spend our time working, yet the profit is nowhere to be seen.
Attempting to exit this grinding-loop, the exhibition Travail Utile, Fatigue Inutilel explores notions of labor and work, from artistic, social, and economical perspectives. Interacting in the same venue, the invited artists and their works draw a multilayered picture of labor and work of the past, present, and future. How do we understand these concepts today? In what way do we envision the future of the workforce? And how can we organize to protect our interests as workers in an ever more precarious world order?
The exhibition gets its title from the British socialist and craftsman William Morris essay, Useful Work versus Useless Toil, published in 1883. To the contrary of common belief, Morris argues that most labor in post-industrial England should not be regarded as productive, but rather as wasteful as it is imposed by what he defines as an exploitative hierarchy, where «(...) the wage earners must always live as the wage-payers bid them, and their very habits of life are forced on them by their masters». This dictation affects not only their work space, but also their homes; as the workers will never afford to consume like their masters. As a result, they have also come to produce endless amounts of non-desirable goods for their own consumption. In the meantime the masters are non-productive, they simply capitalize on the labor of those obliged to work.
Similar to Morris in the late 19th century, we today find ourselves at a crossroads fueled by rapid technological developments. What at first appeared as a promise to lessen the workload, has once again proved itself to just as much be a tool to maximize the profit of the minority at the expense of the general workforce. How do these developments affect the labor market, and our ways of working? And more crucially, how can we face them constructively to avoid a renaissance of the deteriorated worker’s conditions and destruction of nature that came with the revolution of Morris’ days?
The artists of Travail Utile, Fatigue Inutile examine the concept of labor in a broad sense and encourage its audiences to reflect on their relationship to work. By extension, the exhibition is intended as an invitation to reconsider the present-day consumption of labor – where inequalities are growing at a gallop, parallel to a technological development that plausibly will change our definitions of labor and work forever.
