Informal Sector
2 hours per day
09-02 until 15-02-2022
Rundgang,
Kunstakademie Düsseldorf,
Düsseldorf, Germany
Informal Sector is a performative installation that represents patriarchal structures when it comes to who gets to sit at the table and who is the food provider. Women, as the main source of immaterial work, are usually the ones who do not get a say at the table. This installation had 3 characters, out of which a live performer, and two humanoid robots, in a room build from scratch on the hallway of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
Description:
“Informal Sector” is a performative installation where the public can one by one view the repetitive actions of the performer with robots.
When the performance is not happening this work can be seen as an automated installation. The installation is enclosed in a small room that has a hole where the public can put their heads in and lean over to view the installation.
The work is composed of two automatons fixed with small screams onto which a video of a talking mouth is displayed. The heads of the automatons are moving, simulating a conversation. The automatons are sitting at the ends of the table facing each other. The performer is at the side of the table, sitting on a stool and peeling potatoes. She puts the peeled potatoes on the table. Soon after she places the potatoes on the table the robotic arm from one of the automatons is pushing the potatoes away, making them land on the floor. This action is repetitive. The performance has an audio background composed of voices talking in gibberish, representing the automatons talking to each other in an unknown language.
The performance took place daily for two hours over the recourse of a week. The installation could be seen 8 hours a day.
Click on any of the images to enlarge
Idea:
Sometimes it is not sufficient to only be able to sit at the table to be taken into consideration and sometimes women only meet the cold and automated society, talking nonsense and rejecting whatever they have to give as a product of their immaterial work in a capitalist structure.
In a similar mentality to that of the undermined role of the housewife we as humans are finding ourselves in a position of a digital housewife, where, many humans are working for a structural machine that can take many faces from social media to platforms like Task Rabbit.
The on sentence poem on the performative installation room reads:
If shallowness would hurt, we would all boil in pain sometimes.
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