Remedios Zafra Conference
Frágiles y productivos. Contra la precariedad

• Day: June 2
• Hours: 7:00 p.m.
• Space: Aljub
• Face-to-face activity with prior registration and limited places

Es Baluard Museu organizes the public conference “Frágiles y productivos. Contra la precariedad” by Remedios Zafra within the framework of the “Contact Zone” programme.

In this presentation, the essayist and researcher will talk about the conditions of work based on the question: how is creative work being transformed in the complexity of the times we live in? Zafra points out that we intend to observe cultural and artistic practice not only from the artifact and work produced, but also from the “ways of doing”, art as work in a context that overlaps different crises and where precariousness marks the rhythms of production, characterising a singularly enthusiastic and vocational sector. A networked context where the predominant economic modes are strikingly similar to the classic artistic modes (in matters relating to: the self as a product, the normalisation of symbolic capital and the dissolution of life at work).

Remedios Zafra proposes these and other reflections, in an activity open to the public, as the starting point for module 5 of the LAP programme (Laboratory of Art and Thought) in its first edition. This thematic block entitled Works: precarious masses, is based on the analysis of one of the most visible negative effects of capitalism, global precariousness, which is to say occupational, emotional and social precariousness. It recognises the urgency to alleviate the multiple forms of precariousness and rebuild social relations, inequalities of accessibility and working conditions, the enormous gaps between poverty and wealth, worker exploitation, and how we have reached the point of living under a system based on precariousness. Temporary contracts, subcontracting, false self-employment, internships, underground economies, poor working men and women, etc., all ways of eluding the few worker’s rights that still remain. Faced with this, alternative proposals begin to gain strength, such as universal basic income, putting financial markets at the service of social, labour and welfare policies, the redistribution of employment or the democratisation of life within companies. A module that, above all, looks to reflect on and unfold possible forms of resistance.

“Contact Zone” is an annual training and research programme that aims to explore the potential of artistic practice and cultural production as devices for intervention in social change. In its first edition, the need to think about contemporary complexity is presented from five thematic axes: New Institutionalisms, Environmentalisms, Feminisms, Borders and Works.