Is it possible to think time outside labor?
Céline Condorelli in conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri
Figure. 1: Céline Condorelli, Tools for Imagination, 2021, Elmington Estate (UK). Photo: Andy Stagg.
I have been following a line that mirrors the history of work to the history of free time as its necessary negative, looking from the specific situation that, as an artist, by working in culture, I specifically inhabit (with my labor and the institutions that host it) the time space of society’s leisure: I am after all making work for people at weekends and on holidays…
The process of the Tools for Imagination[1] project corresponds to a struggle with and around a specific question: is it possible to think or imagine time outside labor? The question opens conflicts and contradictions, and a sense of crisis that cannot not be resolved—and the sense that it had to be looked at as a process in its own right, to be unfolded and opened up without aiming at an answer, for which different tools were necessary—tools I did not necessarily have.
I brought this question to a poethical reading with Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva, not towards a resolution but to practice reconfiguring this question, and to be supported in this process, in order to discern the form of this crisis from a specific, personal position in space and time. Poethical readings involve the use of tools which are,[2] “in different ways, related to healing and meaning” and “enable thinking about political and social issues in a way that also takes into account what are usually called emotional, physical, and spiritual aspects of existence.” Within the practice of reading—a question—issues are expanded, thoughts are put in relation to existences both large and small, and connections are possible with forces that go through time (both historical and that which is yet to happen). What follows is an edited, altered, and partial version of readings that took place online during the summer of 2021.
Figure. 2: Céline Condorelli, Tools for Imagination, 2021, Elmington Estate (UK). Photo: Andy Stagg.
Céline Condorelli (CC): I was wondering whether a reading should be made in relationship to myself, to the physical space where the Tools for Imagination playground was built, or to the group of people whose labor cumulatively made it a place as it is today (Draycott Close, Camberwell, London)?
Valentina Desideri (VD): The issue is perhaps what is being supported with this question of free time versus labor—you asked it in relation to the places where people congregate and socialize outside their productive time. What does this question ground, what does it support?
Denise Ferreira Da Silva (DFDS): I think that the whole idea of a time that is free of labor seems incomprehensible. However, when the question is asked you have to consider it as a possibility: what kind of relationship between time and work would make it possible to consider the question of free time? Of course, you can see why some folks are offended by the question, those who have personal relations to time and labor that make this something they do not want asked: “What are you saying about me when you ask this question?” It is charged, also emotionally.
In any event, two things seem important to this conversation, that is, they are generally connected to the question. First, there is the sense of expansion, which is in our natal (astrological) chart. It seems to be abstract because it is about making connections without reducing one thing to another. The other is about your work’s ethical implications. They indicate that the questions that emerge through your work do so by connecting to things far and away, [both] temporarily and spatially.
To me, this offers an interesting study of the autobiography of the artist, of the artist’s question(s): the questions come from a singular moment in space-time but also and only through the singularity of an artist’s work. This is also a more general aspect, an apparent contradiction in the ways in which any person’s interventions are also and always echoing more general, political, historical questions.
VD: We may need to bring up a lexicon, to find a way of talking about it. If I think the question from the perspective of you, the artist, I’m thinking of the way you work all the time, so there’s no distinction between free time, or the time you should enjoy, and the work itself containing enjoyment. You collapse the distinction without making the work it takes invisible—on the contrary. Do you see a way to formulate the question about free time?
DFDS: Perhaps we could ask what free time does, or could do, instead of asking what it is. Raising this issue obviously has gained a new significance now (in this COVID-19 era) that we are all working from home. The general idea has been that one’s time at home should be free of a certain kind of labor. We can ask about the issues this raises, and then how it does so.
At the same time, it is important to attend to how, if you address the question from the [position of the] individual “sociological figure,” it is possible to talk about free time. But when approaching it in terms of the social context, there is no such thing: everything that is there, that is public, will always correspond somebody else’s work, whether it was done yesterday, right in that moment, or a hundred years ago, or whether it should be done tomorrow when they come and clean for example. There is also the “future” work that needs to be considered in this context. I guess this is also a conversation about Marx’s concept of about social labor time, about how this needs to be re-configured!
READING FOR THE QUESTION: What does Free Time do?
VD: So, I’m asking the question of what free time does. And we now have an image of our question: the first thing I see is fear of scarcity, unfolding in this question of free time, a kind of material scarcity.
DFDS: This is about scarcity, but it’s also about focusing on it. And that I think probably has to do with a shift in perspective that the question is calling for: I see three or four calls for a shift. The question is about what free time does, but what does the question do to those asking.
Figure. 3: Céline Condorelli, After Niki de Saint Phalle, Major Arcana, Giardino dei Tarocchi, 2023. “The Hangman.”
VD: A shift in the place we ask the question from?
DFDS: The question of free time seems to derive from pain, which is not personal. It is general pain, which is in the world and of the world (Three of Swords). This reading is emphasized by how the environment to which it addresses and on which it lands is imaged in a figure of political power and justice (King of Swords).
VD: The word “free” is a reminder of what has been captured in time, or of the way time is held captive by work, so what is maybe not visible in the question is the struggle to change it, to do something against it. I read here also a hope that production could be different, patient, not extractive. It’s almost a different production of time itself: neither free nor captive. The outcome is about restriction, but within this restriction, there is the possibility to radically shift perspective, turning it upside down.
If we take the concept of free time, what it does is to reduce the world into scarcity, and this is a reminder of the pain. It is from that pain that a shift can happen.
DFDS: It seems that the raising of the question is a questioning of the very idea that people seem to be attached to. Doing it through the artwork, through the practice, elaborates the question in a way that indicates that what is at issue is not the concept of free time (or of labor). This is not a questioning of the concept, but it does something that’s important. Though, it does not yet bring about that change of perspective.
VD: What is made visible through this question is that work is always out there, there is no such thing as “fun,” or “free.” Nothing is free of labor, nothing is free, not even your best time. What kind of balance can be created when you know, what is the consequence of seeing all the labor that anything takes, in terms of consumption, for example the extreme consumption of leisure and luxury?
DFDS: I think that people do see the work being done, but don’t pay attention to it, or don’t find it relevant to what we’re doing while in an art gallery for instance. There is somebody working, sitting there, watching you in a museum or a gallery. It’s hard for most to see that this has any relation to your appreciation of the artwork on the wall. This becomes unavoidable when the question is raised, and people do not know what to do with that. You are asking them to see, while they are there, appreciating and enjoying, having their “free time,” to look at what makes it possible. I think that’s what raising the question does, it disrupts a certain enjoyment. The question makes people miserable. Instead of being happy and enjoying. It force them to think, that, for instance, “somebody has worked in a mine to make available the copper used in that sculpture, so that I can love it now.”
VD: I think that’s going to be a big shift.
DFDS: Be prepared! It will be interesting. It’s a huge strike and then, there will be a strike back, so you should be prepared. But you have to do it, and somehow, we are doing it with you.
VD: The work communicates that the exhibition form is the support structure for a specific kind of enjoyment. The questioning of this enjoyment creates a different form, which might not be recognized as that which it was supposed to do. Once you ask the question about labor and you start making it visible, you might end up with an entirely different form. This may not be what was supposed to happen, nor be the feeling it should generate. This question in that place is like pulling the rug out from under our feet—and yet it is necessary.
CC: The question of making work that demands a shift of perspective, as well as how this is met with incomprehension as to what, or where the work is, is incredibly familiar to me. It is interesting that this is coming out in this reading, because I have been here before. The whole Support Structure project [with Gavin Wade, 2003–2009] had to go through this very same process of becoming, of recognition. We had maybe almost a decade of people asking: “what is the work? What is it that you actually do, and where’s the work?” Because if you’re looking at the wall, and at the lamp, at the floor, and at the name of the person who painted the wall, where’s the artwork? The expectation still is that the artwork is supposed to be what’s on top of all this labor—quite literally—so that such work also demands a certain shift of perspective, in terms of what the object of attention is. Which does happen, it just takes a really long time. And once you see it, you also cannot unsee it—I think this is at least in part the struggle that you are describing. It is not necessarily a very pleasant process, and in many ways, it is irreversible.
DFDS: It’s going to be the same work that you have been doing but magnified; what will come out of this is going to be out there in huge ways. So, you already know what to expect, just know that it will be more intense, because of the added challenge, which is that it will also be breaking hearts. I can’t wait to see it.
Figure 4: Screenshot of Zoom call between Céline Condorelli, Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva, July 2022.
SECOND SESSION 14.07.2022
VD: You wanted to do another reading, from the position of the reversal.
CC: This stayed with me as something I am interested in and curious about. I’m right now in the process of making a film: it is about the building of a place for play, a playground. I have been working on this with Ben Rivers, we work well together, from completely different positions and processes, and it has been really enjoyable. For the soundtrack, and after much searching, I met and commissioned Jay Bernard to write a text/poem dedicated to the place, to this small public square surrounded by housing in London. Jay lived and grew up close by, and has a relationship to the place, spatially, historically, and socially that neither Ben nor I have… The text that has come out—brilliant, composed, fragmented, full of multiplicities and scales both intimate and urban—is in the process of becoming the soundtrack, but also a substantial contribution to the project, to this book, which has in turn allowed me to think back, and listen to the existing conditions and relationships in a different way, with a new vocabulary.
Also, it is both personally fulfilling and relevant to the project when a work produces other works: I work on something and give it to someone else, who does something to it, which becomes the material for the next person to work on, and in this way I feed the gradual labor of transformation.
Meanwhile I’ve let go a little of trying to unravel what free time does, while attempting instead to grasp the role it has fulfilled historically as an idea, as a struggle. This has brought in the fantastic culture of after-work clubs in the early USSR, but more relevantly here in relationship to pre- and post-fascist Italian history. The associations of dopolavoro[3] [after-work] are attached to physical places, the sort of localized, neighborhood houses of culture (unlike the Northern European ones, which are larger, more urban). These appeared from a tradition of local social work, within a culture of European industrial workerism, and they were later absorbed into the fascist state machine, toward the end of making the fascist individual. So that both the ideas of free time and after-work, in Italy specifically, go through the twentieth century’s vast programme of nationalization and become synonymous with large fascist organizations.[4]
In the cases of the houses of culture and free time, they were diverted from a social local project of extreme fragmentation and turned on their head to become a national project of identity-making. This understanding has been useful to me as a way of opening up a sited notion of free time and after-work, specifically in terms of time and of place. It exposes how the struggle for free time has meant very different things in different places. I don’t think it’s clarified my question to you, but it is allowing me to look at it differently, as an idea that navigates through time, changing shape and meaning, until it becomes very polluted.
In the project free time has been replaced by after-work, so that the vocabulary changes to point towards an after—that never comes. The search this announces is of a way of describing, and perhaps reclaiming what happens after work, and whether it would be possible to see what things look like starting from that position “as if,” as if it was possible to start from there, from a slightly fictional point of view, one which requires the reversal of a perspective that you describe in your readings. So today we start from the end, from this fictional outcome, and look backwards.
Figures 5–6: Allan Sekula, Untitled Slide Sequence, 1972, Colección Ordóñez-Falcón de Fotografía, TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Cabildo Insular de Tenerife (L); Harun Farocki, Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik in elf Jahrzehnten, 2006. Collection 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine, Metz (FR). Photo: Frac Lorraine © H. Farocki
VD: We are asking for a reversal of perspective, to start from an image that we will consider as the reverse.
DFDS: You might as well open it and see what else is implicated in this way, in this reversal which in effect has already taken place.
VD: So, the question is that we’re asking an image for an image of this reversal.
DFDS: The shift here is about distribution, it’s not actually work, but is about giving and receiving as a movement.
Figure 7: Céline Condorelli, After Niki de Saint Phalle, Major Arcana, Giardino dei Tarocchi, 2023. “The Devil.”
VD: Here is an image of power, about the misuse of power and the fear of the misuse of power, which is how this question becomes visible. It gives rise to either a feeling of guilt attached to this relation between leisure and work, or real evil, which–given the question—we have to decide [upon to determine] how we look at it.
Figure 8: Céline Condorelli, After Niki de Saint Phalle, Major Arcana, Giardino dei Tarocchi, 2023. “The Wheel of Fortune.”
DFDS: This card (the Wheel of Fortune) is about something changing without somebody being in control of the transformation process. For this reason, sometimes it is read as something evil: it comes out of nowhere, is an imposition and brings suffering. The same relations persist from before, and articulate the shift you were describing, Céline, to different actualizations of free time in different places, and from there to the idea of after work. This is a significant reversal: letting go of the illusion that there is such a thing as free time. The phrase “after-work” signifies that not everything is taken by work, either as it takes place after an eight-hour shift of work, or in the sense of after-work that has dominated our lives.
VD: This is the ethical relationship to power, in the sense that it’s always related to the fear of misuse of power, to guilt, maybe to productivity and that kind of relationship to work, as well as the ethical dimension of work. All of this gets distributed in some ways: what would happen to work if it wasn’t about producing, but reproducing, or redistributing?
CC: Why is the devil not about actual evil?
DFDS: Sometimes it is! It can be, when this is how we see the situation, but not necessarily how the situation is. In this case, it’s not how it is—it’s how one sees it.
VD: I’m reading also a message about after-work as an expression of something. It also makes me think of a form of transformation, how the work is also making something, transforming material, from something to something else. What if the idea of work would change through what after-work is, so that work itself wouldn’t necessarily be that exploitative, restrictive relationship that requires release, but something that is able to materialize, to express the change: and that is the challenge. That could be one way that to look at it. And then following that is the gathering together with people, and celebrating, like after-work.
CC: Is there a form of sociality at the end? As a reading, is this always the present? Is there anything left behind from previous struggles?
DFDS: Instead of fear and anxiety there is a shift that is to come regardless. It is about the world, the actualization of something that is worldly in scope, and not necessarily also individual. That is, there is de-individualization of this process within the shift of perspective, which is about sociality. At the same time, the individual is there and is figured by an ambiguous image, one which indicates selfishness, in terms of trying to get away with something that you shouldn’t which, whether or not necessary, brings about a sense of guilt. In sum, the sense of shame and guilt in there. This, I think, is associated with the discourse of work. But it is not intrinsic to it.
VD: What if work would be regenerative? The larger question, on the scale of the world, is about what is beyond work. This shifts the question towards care, what if “after” meant also “beyond” work? There is a challenge in defending that position, because it is about redistribution of wealth, of resources, materially. In the face of change, how do we come together and attend to the circularity of giving and receiving?
DFDS: Something here is asking us to consider what is being presented, to spend time with it: there are two directions coming about in this reading, that need reflecting upon. This requires that we think with it, meditate with it rather than outline what it is, as perhaps the best way forward. As we know you carry two or more possibilities without wanting to dissolve them, and that may be the tension between the individual and the collective that is in there, with elements totally displacing anything like an individual from consideration.
[1] Tools for Imagination is an artwork by Céline Condorelli, which consists of a film, After Work, made in collaboration with Ben Rivers with a soundtrack with Jay Bernard, an installation from which to view the film, titled Spatial Composition 13, and the book, Two Years Vacation, edited by Paolo Caffoni (Archive Books, forthcoming 2023), where this text was originally published. These three connected works were developed over a series of exhibitions titled Deux Ans de Vacances, Dos Años de Vacaciones, and Two Years Vacation, in relationship to the construction of a public artwork for the Elmington Estate, London, also titled Tools for Imagination, which is a playground commissioned by South London Gallery and Southwark Council, London.
[2] In their own words: “We shared an orientation in our separate explorations of knowledge practices and tools—Tarot, Astrology, Alchemy, Palmistry, Reiki’ […] and their ‘capacity to complexify and amplify the ways of thinking and existing and corresponding ways of acting politically and ethically.’ https://www.thesensingsalon.org/about
[3] “Dopolavoro (after-work) is both a term coined in 1920s Italy to designate the free time gained from the reduction of work hours, and at the same time one that corresponds to the institution created by the fascist regime in order to structure this time.” Victoria de Grazia and Sergio Luzzatto (eds.), Dizionario del Fascismo, Giulio Einaudi, 2002, translation author’s own, p. 443.
[4] This process is explored and unfolded through Sergio Bologna’s text in this publication and the work of Victoria de Grazia, which I encountered through conversations with Paolo Caffoni.