Santiago Sierra: El trabajo es la Dictadura (Work is Dictatorship)
29/01/2013.
Ivorypress Space. [MAD] 22/01 > 30/01/2013
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
Last summer coincided with Santiago Sierra at a conference, where we had been invited, in the Milan Triennale. He told me about the work that was being prepared and these days in two different galleries you can see part of his impressive work.
Simulation of one handwritten page for El trabajo es la Dictadura, 2013 | Courtesy of Ivorypress
Now, Ivorypress Publishing House is preparing the launch of a new volume of the LiberArs series, devoted to small-format artists’ books. The publication is a new work by the artist Santiago Sierra, titled El trabajo es la Dictadura (Work is Dictatorship), and will be the result of a performance held in Ivorypress Space, Madrid, throughout nine working days. Thirty people will fill out, by hand, the 1000 blank copies of the book that will be published, repeatedly writing the sentence ‘Work is Dictatorship’, for the minimum wage recommended by the National Employment Service.
The workers will be unemployed people, hired through a public employment offer of the National Employment Service. They will use a standard pen to fill out the blank books, which will be printed only with straight blue horizontal lines such as the ones in school notebooks. The work involves a profound reflection, finger-pointing the current social situation in Spain regarding employment conditions. The performance, which will be held at Ivorypress Space, will be open to the public from 22 to 30 January from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and from 4:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.
The resulting artist’s book El trabajo es la Dictadura will be commercialised and sold for €24 each. The final price equals the whole production cost of the book, with no benefits. This way, the new volume of Ivorypress’s LiberArs series aligns with the spirit that pervades the performance.
This action is coherent with the whole artistic production of Santiago Sierra, who in the last decade has carried out a great number of politically critical performances where participants are, in some way, victims of the very situation that is denounced. Thus in 2012 he made war veterans from different conflicts— Afghanistan, Colombia, Vietnam, Iraq, Northern Ireland—stand for hours facing the wall as part of several performances held in Nuremberg, Germany; Adelaide, Australia; Manchester, UK; and Bogota, Colombia, among other cities. In the same vein, in 2010 Sierra hired a group of workers who were to stay inside closed boxes in the Castello del Roccolo, in Busca, Italy. That year he also completely buried ten workers in the sand beach of Calambrone, Italy.
In parallel with the performance carried out at Ivorypress Space, the public will also be able to visit Santiago Sierra and Jorge Galindo’s exhibition Los Encargados (The Ones in Charge) at Helga de Alvear gallery.
Public performance: 22-30 January from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and from 4:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Venue: Ivorypress C/ Comandante Zorita 48 (Madrid)
More information
SANTIAGO SIERRA
Santiago Sierrra, (Born in Madrid, 1966). 1989. Degree in Fine Arts, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain. Workshop at Círculo de Bellas Artes, (J. G. Dokoupil), Madrid, Spain. 1989-1991 visiting student at Hochschule für Bildende Künste (FE Walter, BJ Blume and S. Brown), Hamburg, Germany. 1995-1997 Research Fellowship in the School of San Carlos, University of Mexico, Mexico City. His beginnings are linked to alternative art circuits in the capital of Spain—El Ojo Atómico, Espacio P—although he would go on to develop much of his career in Mexico (1995–2006) and Italy (2006–10), and his work has always exerted a great influence on artistic literature and criticism.
Sierra's oeuvre strives to reveal the perverse networks of power that inspire the alienation and exploitation of workers, the injustice of labour relations, the unequal distribution of wealth produced by capitalism, the deviance of work and money, and racial discrimination in a world scored with unidirectional (south–north) migratory flows.
Revisiting and updating certain strategies characterising the Minimalism, Conceptual and Performance Art of the seventies, Sierra interrupts flows of capital and godos (Obstruction of Freeway With a Truck’s Trailer, 1998; Person Obstructing a Line of Containers, 2009); he hires labourers to reveal their precarious circumstances (20 Workers in a Ship’s Hold, 2001); he explores the mechanisms of racial segregation derived from economic inequalities (Hiring and Arrangement of 30 Workers in Relation to Their Skin Color, 2002; Economical Study of The Skin of Caracans, 2006); and refutes the stories that legitimate a democracy based on state violence (Veterans of the Wars of Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Irak Facing the Corner, 2010–2; Los encargados, 2012).
