1. Precarity

Precarity is a manifestation of unequal power relations, which has been increasing and expanding globally under contemporary sovereignty of capital; precarisation of lives in jeopardy of violence, extraction and exploitation. Neoliberalism as an ideology and a practice seeps into every aspect of life: to live with debt, overwork, budget cuts and layoffs, entrepreneurial obligations, and many more extractive experiences that go beyond labour. Living under the conditions of evictability caused by gentrification, climate collapse, visa regime and war makes life predictable, reducible and even disposable. From human and non-human bodies to territories and a planetary scale, our world is conditioned by exhausting processes consuming precarious bodies and other planetary resources for centuries of extractivist and colonial (infra)structures and institutions. Institutions form infrastructures that condition not only the way that resources and access are fortified, distributed, or extended, but also shape conceptual, discursive and sociocultural frameworks of understanding our own life/work, and modes of relating to others. Today, working with or alongside institutions highlights the urgency of thinking about the politics of exhaustion and comfort in the face of such perpetual precarisation. What could this work of rejecting precarity politics look like?

"If precarisation has become a governmental instrument of normalisation surpassing specific groups and classes, then social and political battles themselves should not assume differential separations and hierarchies. Rather, those who wage such battles should look specifically for what they have in common in the midst of normalisation: a desire to make use of the productivity of precarious living and working conditions to change these modes of governing, a means of working together to refuse and elude them."¹

The ideas and practices of ‘comfort’ are crucial in imagining a different world; conceptualising comfort in a way that goes beyond constructed and capitalist ideas more than just the process of rejuvenation for the purpose of maintaining a certain level of productivity. Instead, the act of imagining other conceptions of comfort in terms of different sociopolitical orders and ways of performing in the world that are based on solidarity, allyship, and commitment to each others’ struggles in varying proximities, within everydayness and across the global geopolitical landscape.

2. Curatorship

In the field of art, design and architecture, foregrounding of public display and its consumability in institutions, creates an economy of display and hierarchies of visibility. These economies of display govern the fields, and in turn, make certain practices that uphold their spaces and mechanisms, invisible and precarious. Think of freelance builders setting up exhibitions, migrant construction workers without access to insurance, ones who clean buildings and institutions, precarious artists who accept underpaid deals in exchange for exposure, (junior) designers routinely working unpaid overtime and many more.

Experiences of precarity and occupying positions outside of fortified enclosures of comfort and visibility, can inform the politics of the work when one is given a seat at the table. It matters where we come from and how we arrive at the table. Experiences of violence can condition one’s politics when moving through strata of precarity and privilege. Curatorship is one of these positions where direct access to negotiating what goes on the public display and getting to use the institutional resources is provided. Where the labour of negotiating access, visibility and precarity is at stake.

Curatorial work is one example of the type of work within the creative and design field, that can direct the flow of resources and their allocations; a type of work that is heavy on administrative level with spreadsheets as tools that determine the mechanism of distribution of tasks, resources, and outcomes. The spreadsheets are the architecture of distributing means, capital, access, comfort and precarity. In this sense the work of curating can be a work of subverting the extractive modes of collaboration, counter-neoliberal administration and initiating logistics that can enable comfort against precarity.

The intention here, however, is not to romanticise or glamorise this commitment, or applaud such work. It is to discuss its necessity and importance in the politics of such professional positions. The commitment to the labour of negotiating these dynamics is not always visible work. It is not monumental or extravagant, yet it is essential if one is to elude collective exhaustion.

3. Bike Messenger Rounds

As architect-artists, in 2020 we curated a show and a programme² thinking of these very themes of exhaustion and comfort, and brought together works that took sociopolitical stances by fictioning ideas and practices of comfort; a project we called Fictioning Comfort.³ The first covid lockdowns hit right in the middle of when we were creating this project. Instead of cancelling or postponing (which was common institutional practice at that time, and hit freelance workers severely while contracted staff were fine) in the negotiation with the exhibition space, we decided to keep our commitments to the people we had invited to show their work. Now we had to figure out how to curate the show under lockdown. Lockdown conditions went beyond no in-person meetings or studio visits. It forced us to reorient our curatorial thinking around exhaustion and comfort. How were we to do this work in a moment of deep crisis? How to make sense of these work commitments when all priorities have been rearranged? Doing this project became about reimagining how we would relate to people and their labour with a deeper sense of commitment than before.

And we experimented with ways of producing a show that attempts to avoid, as much as possible, the exhaustion of bodies, spaces, and resources. Being productive while appreciating slowness, doubt, and accounting for the individual and collective precariousness we all experienced. Our homes became sites for production, rest, and rethinking exhaustion and comfort in such a deep crisis. In our rooms, gradually sinking into the fiction of ‘being at home’ in the world. What follows is some reflections on one of our curatorial interventions in this project, which here is meant as a tool to think about strategising and negotiating the administration and logistics of curatorship.

Nowruz had just occurred, a few weeks into the Netherlands’ first COVID lockdown. To celebrate together while remaining socially distanced, we wrote letters to friends and delivered them on bikes, and had a drink at their door or stoop, at a distance. This idea of connecting to people despite the crisis leached into our practice with the curating work. We wondered how we could connect and relate to one another in an affective way, when sitting in the same room was not possible.

We decided to use the same bike delivery idea in the project among the people involved; artists, artists’ collaborators, production people, gallery staff, friends; and people kept being added through suggestions, and so the network kept growing beyond our curatorial relations. We turned our living room into a production space and a dispatch unit, and made sure every delivery round there was at least one package circulating, going from “dispatch” to everyone. Others in the rounds could contribute in any capacity they wanted to. For eight weeks leading to the exhibition openings, “gifts” were distributed and exchanged within the network twice a week. There were zines, cushions, ceramic tiles, letters, a collection of mold jars, a collective Rotterdam food map, books, joints, wallpaper pieces, teas, little ceramic bowls, etc. It was an activation of a politics of kinship by providing the labour of initiation and logistics. It was a slow and stretchy infrastructure to extend and expand the space of the project beyond what constituted a formal exhibition as a public display.

Together with the bike messenger for these rounds — Tomi Hilsee, who had worked professionally in that capacity in the U.S. and the Netherlands — we thought about the history and community of bike messengers and the mechanism of dispatch offices. Which exemplifies (invisible) admin and logistic work that makes larger formal procedures possible, yet forming their own subterranean network. One that instead of committing to the efficiency-based pace of capitalist time, is committed to producing delays, kinships, and disobedience through alleycat races, collective prolonged standby, for instance.⁴ And in the context of our project, that was one that is focused on relations built between people through gifts, rather than seamless flows of things for promotion.

As a gift economy, it was an exercise in distributing and “networking” that was deliberately slow and affective, and did not remove itself from the experiences of precarity that we were all living in various degrees, as well as the political questions at hand; instead, leaned into them. Perhaps more than a formal project or a strict professional framework, it became a way to keep doing things, together, in contact from a distance.

The urban infrastructure was activated and claimed by the slow pace of bike messenger’s wheels within a rushed capitalist mindset of swifting to the “new normal” under covid and forcefully constructing new habits of productivity. This route-based and decentralised placemaking practice which inhabited the threshold of many homes exemplifies a situated spatial curatorial strategy. One which worked not for the promotion of an institutional practice of exploiting resources, building and bodies, but gave room for collectivity. Urban fabric with its complex neoliberal dynamic of the public versus the private could serve to make smaller scale commons among whom they had things in common.

The question of visibility came back here at the moment of the exhibition “opening”. How could these things that were moving around between our houses and bike messenger’s bags and “dispatch”, be documented and displayed? But also, why must they be documented and shown, and perhaps even, for whom? The collection of bike messenger’s redacted manifests and their logbook was made publicly visible in the exhibition display, offline and online. This unarchivable and undocumentable process is against the economy of display that constitutes the professional field’s principle of visibility as a way of valuating labour and its allocated resources.

4. Strategy

This curatorial intervention in the form of a bike messenger delivery network working over a period of time preceding a public exhibition came out of an urgency to maintain complicities and commitment to each others’ conditions, using institutional resources that were available. Rather than a promotional communication strategy it was an administrative and logistical effort of solidarity to reorganise the distribution of resources that one gets access to in the role of a curator, in a moment of deep crisis.

This strategising and distributing resources is learnt from experiences of precarious life/work without a lot of prior access to resources or people. Having learnt that in order to show work or make conversations, we would just have to do it ourselves. Just making the space, hosting other people, initiating and self-organising the event, making the books. This is something we had learned from working in informal economies such as in self-publishing, where the discourse around how to acquire resources, subvert institutional access gates, leak resources out, etc is prominent.

This project was an exercise to realise that it is possible to operationalise access and mobilise resources for anti-violence practices within our field. Making space partly means working through existing spaces; to extend and expand resources, organisationally rearrange, re-articulate the way things are made public. It takes the commitment to strategising against the grain of cultural capitalism and its identity-based attention economy, to open space up for urgent and current anti-violence conversations.

Since then, many iterations of similar bike messenger delivery networks have taken place in various other contexts (some more meaningful than others), and responded to other crises that we found ourselves oriented towards; occupation, revolution, war, etc. And there we have asked ourselves how to engage with this violence and crisis from where we are, from here.

Bios

WORKNOT! is focused on critical spatial practice and theory. It works across architecture, art, publishing, and curation. Its work is research-oriented design based on critical thinking, and radical spatial pedagogy. Its work has been shown and published at Venice Biennale, Nieuwe Instituut, Sharjah Triennale of Architecture, e-flux Architecture, among other places. WORKNOT! is founded by Arvand Pourabbasi and Golnar Abbasi.

Arvand Pourabbasi is a spatial practitioner, researcher, and educator. His work focuses on decolonial readings of domesticity, public realm, and spatial pedagogy. He is a co-founder of Rotterdam-based collective WORKNOT! and educator at Design Academy Eindhoven and Willem de Kooning Academie, Rotterdam.

Golnar Abbasi is an architect-artist, researcher, curator, and publisher. Her work focuses on politics of domesticity, anti-colonial space, practices of resistance, and historical narrative. She is a Ph.D. candidate at Faculty of Architecture and Urban Environment TU Delft and alumni of Jan van Eyck Academie. She is a co-founder of Rotterdam-based collective WORKNOT! and an educator at Piet Zwart Institute and Willem de Kooning Academie, Rotterdam.