Euromayday goes documenta

This campaign is a project in process. The first step of this campaign is the documenta12. Within the last weeks we have talked to numerous janitors, trainees, cultural workers, supervisors, securities, knowledge workers. We are particularly interested in the precarious arrangements we all agree to in our everyday lives. Exhaustion and enthusiasm, dullness and lack of time were issues mentioned many times during the interviews. Taking the interviews as initial point we’ll present a first text which we want to discuss and edit with the participants of the interviews and all other interested. Five Open Editing events will be held for this purpose.

Timetable in Kassel during the documenta XII

While precarious conditions of work increase, not only the patterns of struggle have become questionable: Also the classical pictures of workers can hardly depict the exhaustion, the strain or the potential strength of McJobbers and the fictitiously self-employed. In this matter the Euromayday parades, which took place in several European cities in the past years, experimented with forms of visibility. Accordingly, we want to discuss possible ways of making precarious working and living conditions visible for activist purposes. What forms of invisibility come into being at the same time? What kinds points of contact between political activism and artistic strategies are there?

The movement of the Intermittents du spectacle (Paris) was established in summer 2003. Actors and actresses, sound engineers and stage designers blocked several culture festivals as a reaction to massive cutbacks in social benefits. The film is a documentary of the assemblies and blockades of this summer. Afterwards there will be a discussion with the activists about what happened since.