Participant

A New Job To Unwork At

09 Sep - 14 Oct 2018

Karin Schneider
Sabotage, 2017
CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco. Courtesy of Karin Schneider
A NEW JOB TO UNWORK AT
9 September – 14 October 2018

Curated by Andrew Kachel and Clara López Menéndez

As an activity that is perhaps as widely shared as it is varied in character, what potentials are latent in work as a ground for reconsidering entrenched social, political, and economic relations? A new job to unwork at is a multidisciplinary project that studies the many social, material, and economic processes understood as “work,” and the ways in which this classification of human activity operates as a legitimating discourse that privileges certain subjects and life choices. The project is the continuation of ongoing research that examines the ideological consequences of work in shaping our identities and experiences of the world.

The latest materialization of this investigation takes the shape of a series of public programs (August) and an exhibition (September) at Participant Inc. In this iteration, we draw on the concept of unwork as a wry subversion of work, focusing on practices that re-imagine work’s intended flows and ends, often short-circuiting the power relations inherent in labor relations, distilling their (often) destructive potentials into a politics of commoning and care.