Sofia Caesar
Workation

Exhibition title:

Workation

Description of the exhibition:

In Workation, Sofia Caesar showcases a body of work she has been developing in the past years by engaging moving bodies, including the public’s and her own. Beyond binaries between work and leisure, Caesar explores possibilities to improvise within her own body’s constraints and conditions. The works in the exhibition explore the recuperation of pleasure and leisure, spanning from historical adverts from the car manufacturer FIAT, youtube campaigns, smartphone screens, softwares for motion analysis, to flexible working contracts, participation, and the artist’s working conditions. Through her performative work, she investigates the body’s generative capacity to suspend the logics of productivity. She creates spaces to look at how recent “flexible” ideologies instrumentalize the body, while she remains looking for ways-out in which the body shows its complexity and otherworldly force.

This proposal has the intent to find a hosting institution in Belgium for the exhibition that will be first showed at Centro Helio Oiticica, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

In other words: White men working on the beach, in hammocks, and from bed. A4 sheets suspended in mid air. Images of Workation (Work+Vacation) arrive violently on my screen. Spitting on my face a model that only a few can be. A model we are not. A model we all want. Few have offices in the beach. Few use co-working spaces, network, or accomplish things without leaving the hammock (in Portuguese rede = both hammock and network). What a violent relationship, the one between the model and the body. The image and the body. Language and the body. From this encounter some moments arise when the body shows its strength facing whatever logic that conditions it. The body lives dying, being and not being at the same time, mouth opens wide laughing painfully. The body maintains itself, pulsates, beyond prescribed ideals of what is pleasure or pain or leisure or happiness. It simply is. With my lazy body, and for the body of the public, this exhibition is a search for the suspension of conditions, of time, of languages, of logics, of models. A celebration of something indescribable in words, a sheet of paper falling, a body in slowmotion, achair upside down. My body trying to escape the instrumentalizing machine that conditions me, that conducts me, that choreographs me. An improvisation within constraints or the moving of my own conditions. A search for moments that escape the recuperation of my pleasure and my pain.

Curatorial support (Rio exhibition): Raphael Fonseca
Co-production and research support: Caveat - a Jubilee research project
Choreographic support: Flavia Meireles

Caveat foreword:

Sofia Caesar's practice experiments with the structures that surround and affect us. She engages with the body as a tool to play and interact with those structures while exploring the possibilities offered by a process of opening up and rendering hybrid different mediums (film, performance, publishing...). Since a a few months now, Sofia Caesar has engaged with the Caveat research project developed by curator Florence Cheval, artist Ronny Heiremans and legal advisor Julie Van Elslande, that inquires into the current working conditions in the art field and more broadly into the ecology of artistic practices. 

In a first stage, the collaboration was developed around the relational object/sculpture by Sofia Caesar, Zero Hour (2018). First, in the context of a reading room in which a text by Dieter Lesage, “Permanent Performance”1, was read and discussed collectively, and in a second step during Bâtard festival (Beurschouwburg, Nov 2018), where the Zero Hour piece was activated both through a performance of Sofia Caesar and a panel discussion with jurist Sarah de Groof moderated by Caveat. This series of sharing moments were foundational to start exploring collectively labour time problematics from a juridical and political perspective, but also from an aesthetic perspective. Through this specific work, we actively engaged in discussing how the contract as a document crucially affects our experience, perception, and even incorporation of working conditions. As Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris puts it in his theory of “documentality” : “Documents do not only act as regulators in the economy and in the legal sphere, but are the producers of values, norms, cultures, conflicts, up to determining (through education and imitation) individual intentionality and allowing (through sharing) for collective intentionality.”2 In that sense, while being activated as an artwork, Sofia Caesar's sculpture also very subtly stands for a potential series of reconfigurations of actual zero hour contract templates, that may open up the possibility for creating alternatives values, norms, cultures, and therefore institutions, to arise. “Through the materiality of the language tools, words finally carry worlds.”3During the Bâtard moment, Sofia Caesar also introduced another work, Workers leave the factory (2017), which is also making use of a shared contract to experiment with ongoing reconfigurations of the work itself by different groups of people.

Caesar's work not only engages into testing out the porosity of the different mediums. It also aims at constructing experiments that go beyond all kinds of binaries, amongst which the one that lies within work and leisure. These reflexions were first exposed and tested out by Sofia Caesar in the context of a collective workshop organised by Caveat in Wiels in December 2018. The artist then came to name this specific research and project Workation - a neologism that actually exists and that is used to describe the emergence of new freelance, digital, nomad workers that go to resorts to work all day, therefore echoing the concept of the endlessly flexible subject promoted by neoliberalism. Since then, Sofia Caesar has engaged in a process that captures this “workation” term, not to mimic this practice that usually leads to a state of exhaustive “permanent performance”, but rather to appropriate it, to embody it in order to test out the discomforts that it may create both within the minds and the bodies of the workers. “(T)o have a body is to learn to be affected, meaning ‘effectuated’, moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or non-humans.”4 The body is not a surface but “an interface that becomes more and more describable as it learns to be affected by more and more elements. The body is thus not a provisional residence of something superior (...) but what leaves a dynamic trajectory by which we learn to register and become sensitive to what the world is made of.”5 While gazing at those publicity stock images of workers supposedly enjoying their “workation” condition in “idyllic” places, Sofia Caesar experiments with the bodily discomforts provided by the slow and intense mimicking of those workers postures while subtly collapsing through time. A process that I would relate to this sentence from Natasa Petresin following Vinciane Despret: “Learning how to recognize, assume, and think this discomfort, (…) can lead to greater attentiveness and a fruitful form 
of hesitation.”6

More broadly, Sofia Caesar's works actively engage with opening up to the possibility for the work to be affected by the encounter with the other(s), therefore allowing the group and the process to affect the work itself, to constantly reopen it. Reenactment strategies – the same, but otherwise – are also part of that. In that sense, Sofia Caesar's Workation project not only deals with questions related to work, but also with authorship, or rather shared authorship. In the meantime, Sofia Caesar engages into alternative durations, much slower processes, that question how different timings and rhythms may also affect our condition7. Each of these proposals open up alternative modes of operating that will for sure bring food for thought to the Caveat research project and to the people that engage with her work. 

Florence Cheval for Caveat
        

1 Dieter Lesage, “Permanent Performance”, Performance Research, 17:6, 14-21, 2012, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2013.775752                 
2 Maurizio Ferraris, “Constitutive Rules: The Manifest Image and the Deep Image. [Special Issue]”, Argumenta 4, 1, 2018, p. 90.
3 Bruno Latour, “How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies”, article written for symposium organized by Akrich and Berg in Paris,  September 1999, ‘Theorizing the Body’.
4 Bruno Latour, op. cit.
5 Bruno Latour, op. cit.
6 Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, “For Slow Institutions”, E-Flux Journal, #85, October 2017.
7 See Isabelle Stengers, Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science, Polity, 2018.

List of artworks in the exhibition:
    

1. Workation
2. Excess Lines
3. Zero Hour
4. Worker leaves the factory
5. Conditions for the work

1. Workation, 2019. Work in progress. Video Installation. Monitor, smartphone, projection, sound speakers, hammock, mattresses, paper, sheets.


Description of work:

This work is still in progress, but is documented here because it is an important step in my trajectory. It is my first large scale film installation, that I will exhibit this year in a solo show in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and later also in São Paulo and hopefully Brussels. The installation comprehends 4 videos filmed in Rio de Janeiro, together with sound, light, projection, monitors, phone, beach chairs, cargo net, and papers. 

In the videos, I am interacting with a phone. In the phone, one can see publicity images that I found on the internet by searching for the term ‘workation’ on stock image websites. The images portray flexible individuals that inhabit the contradiction of being both in vacation and at work. Initially, the scenarios where I filmed mimicked the elements found on the stock images. Little by little, I move in ways that destroy or deconstruct the "ideal" model constructed by the preexisting stock images. The movements I experiment with mix experiences and positions of falling, laziness, relaxation, with tension, discomfort, and effort. Through my body, I try to maintain a contradictory state between effort and laziness, between leisure and work, with the intention to find a way out from this binary logic. Starting with a fall, I find actions that counteract the model presented by the ‘workation’ stock imagery.


List of videos:

1. Workation (rede), vídeo in loop, duration 2’14’’
2. Workation (cama), vídeo in loop, duration 2’50’’
3. Workation (praia), vídeo in loop, duration 2’30’’
4. Workation (papéis), vídeo in loop, duration 1’30’’

Details of videos:

The installation of this work intends to create situations engaging with the actual body of the public. The videos will be shown in an environment that explores elements seen in the video: papers, beach, forest, bed, sheets, hammock. The movements seen in the video will also expand into the exhibition space as the public will enact gestures of falling, lying down, resting, hanging out, standing still, etc., in order watch the videos. Below are some exhibition drawings.

1. Workation (rede)

 

In an apartment, I am lying on the hammock with a phone and there is an image of ‘workation’ displayed on its screen, which is also visible for the public. The camera “zooms in” the phone screen while I fall slowly from the hammock. We see that in the phone there’s the image of a man lying on a hammock wearing a white shirt and black slacks holding a work briefcase. 
Link to video: https://vimeo.com/320738945. Password: bizarro

1. Workation (cama) 

In a bed, surrounded by work materials, I am holding a phone. In the phone, one can see the image of a man working from bed. The camera ‘zooms out’, while I slowly fall, messing up the bed and undoing the scene. Link to video: https://vimeo.com/320791795. Password: bizarro

1. Workation (praia) 

On a beach, I am sitting on a beach chair with a computer and a phone. The camera ‘zooms in’ the screen of the phone while I slowly fall from the chair. On my phone screen we see the image of a man working from the beach. Link to video: https://vimeo.com/320795384. Password: bizarro

        D.        Workation (papéis)
Sitting on a table next to a forest at the Lage house in Rio, I hold a phone. We see that in my phone there’s the image of a group of people at wo rk throwing papers into the air. The camera ‘zooms out’ revealing that I’m also throwing papers into the air. A lot of paper. Link to video: https://vimeo.com/320746458. Password: bizarro 


2. Excess Lines, 2017. Digital video, 4:3, 7’30’’


The view from a computer screen is overlaid with an animated diagram, while we hear a conversation I had with an archivist from Centro Storico Fiat, in Turin, while we watched films from the archive. While th e voices interpret and speculate about the images, the diagram creates connections and circular narrations about the contemporary techniques of diagraming movement used to optimize production systems.                
                                                                                                                    Video still

Link: vimeo.com/249797980 
Password: bizarro3. 

Zero Hour, 2018
Metal stand, powder coating, bearings, wheels, printed paper tubes. 184 x 270 x 270 cm.

The paper structures contain phrases of a ‘Zero Hour’ working contract. The four sides of the structures present alternatives to contractual language, speaking of unsaid the elements of such contracts. The metal rack is also moveable, making it possible to rotate each line 360 degrees and bring three dimensions to the text. By re-arranging the order of the structure, the public can establish new relations and write other contractual texts in space.

Video documentation: https://vimeo.com/271712916/e137c9b7f9 password: bizarro


4. Workers leave the factory, 2017.  60 tiles of 50 x 50 x 2 cm each, UV-print on PVC industrial tiles. Contracts, performances, dimensions variable. 2017. Permanent installation at Parco d'Arte Vivente, Turin, Italy.

I translated 60 seconds of the film “Le officine della Fiat (Corso Dante) 1911” into 60 printed floor tiles with text and patterns. Each tile narrates one second of the film, focusing on the actions of one subject, who while leaving the factory amongst a crowd of workers, stops and stares at the camera. The text and diagrams in the tiles embody the floor of the Fiat factory, and an analytical tone inspired by motion analysis techniques. This text also is a score for a deconstructed re-enactment of the subject's actions. 
        In scheduled events, this floor is re-assembled by groups, that at each time install the floor in different ways, continuously re-writting the narrative from the 1911 film. Every time the piece is re-assembled, the group writes the instructions and established the condition for the next time the work will be assembled. This process happens with the writing of contracts. 
        
 5. Conditions for the work, 2017-?. Series of A4 documents

This work is a series of documents that grows every time Worker leaves the factory is assembled in actions with the public. The documents are displayed on a long shelf. At each document that is written, the participants of Worker leaves the factory are asked to re-think the conditions for the performance to take place, includ  ing remuneration of performers, working conditions, location, and authorship rights. So, from one document to the other, we see differences in thinking about working conditions. For example, in the first document the remuneration is non-existent, and in the second, the participants of the action are prescribed to be remunerated with the copyright of the work Worker leaves the factory.  Exhibition drawings for show at Helio Oiticica Art Centre, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Opening October 5 2019.

These drawings do not represent a model to be applied in the Belgium exhibition.

ROOM 1:

Works:
Workation (praia)
Projection on wall, speakers (beach sound), mattresses, papers. ROOM 2:
Works:  Workation (rede, cama e papel) 
 ROOM 2 (CONT.):
Works:  Workation (rede, cama e papel)
  Room 2 (Details):

Works: Workation (cama)
Intalation with monitor, wall made of mattresses, sheets.
 


























ROOM 2 (details):
Works: Workation (papéis)
 Papers, monitor, net, mattresses





























ROOM 2 (details):
Works: Workation (rede)
Monitor, speakers (with citarra sounds) ROOM 3:
Works: linhas de excesso, zero hora, wall piece (conditions for the work?)