The Arcadia Missa Open-Office programme was an attempt, through its research and curatorial programme, to address precarity as experienced by artists and other immaterial labourers working today. This Anthology offers a record of this exploration. It is also an attempt to propose new conditions for cultural production, specifically those avoiding the fetishization of the objects and social relations of precarity itself. It hopes for a reclamation of representation from the cynical and recursive circulation of images within capitalist realism, and its de-politicised conceptions of the body in vectored space. AM-OO made explicit ways in which post-Fordist ideological formations such as neoliberalism, democracy as consumer choice, and ‘instant’ communication have come to define the ways in which we work and create (or ‘playbour’), under the rubric of globalized capitalism. The programme taught us that this examination offers both a site for critique (albeit one always however in tension with the safe, institutional discourse on precarity), but also a collective desire for something different. Where precarity, work, and the ideology of prosumption stop being the total system we have, as yet, only been able to embed ourselves and our social bodies in. Understanding our performance as actors in immaterial and cognitive realms has emerged as one such site. Similarly, if representation, and indeed self-representation, is treated not as an instance for the tired post-human dissolution of our corporeality, but instead a moment or commons for engagement in a collective body, we can maybe realise that we ourselves are carrying our own best tools for resistance – - our selves. Much of the work within this anthology reflects an attempt to explore this in practice; to re-embody the self-image-object and claim back both the social agency and responsibility late-capitalism seduces us into relinquishing. Moving on from AM-OO we realise the need to subjectivize all production modes (how we ‘live’, not just how we ‘art’), outside of the base descriptions applied to them under societal structures and consumption. In the meantime: #nodads.
(TouchedMarseille)