Sniffing out the post-covid world, the corporate wolf is already showing his paw under the cuddly stuffed skin of teleworking. OK agreed. But what about his tail, the
teleocio?
Is it just as inevitable? As salvific and miraculous as they say? Meeting for dinner on Saturday and leisure of the monopolized masses and collected at home and safe distance by
online
platforms
, where Netflix would be the macro-cinema popcorn in a shopping center and Filmin the cuca and
indie room
where to look good by taking the cultural league on the first date. Video game marathons that last weeks and months, held by gamers (sorry for the cursilada) who replace the blessed empowered gangs of los
pringaos
of the kind of a lifetime.
Decomposition of the collective cultural experience (theater, concerts, blackjack puppets) into homemade bubbles that cancel out its essence.
Talks, readings and presentations broadcast by networks for a literary world that now practices by Twitter the self-promotion, the rally and the skinning of the usual cliques.
Fairs and galleries that open and show their works in
viewing rooms
(more kitschy) where the tacky symbolic of the VIP pass is not lacking.
Museums that are visited interactively (?) From the sofa.
Travel by ordinary citizens harassed when not directly prohibited according to abstruse and often incoherent or ineffective rules (Danes to Madrid, ok; Murcians to Pamplona,
no way
) ...
More information
"The virtual does not stop being a picture": why in painting physical experience is essential
And Zoom as the new main square (free for now, but not public at all) that we have all without thinking adopted as a place of (dis) encounter.
The real threat of the covid, or especially the global political reaction, dragged first by the emergency and now by the inertia of the vested interests, has accelerated a trend towards atomization and monetization (another ugly word) of playful, unproductive and rest that had already been imposed for a decade.
What does recent art have to say about this? Céline Condorelli's new project (Paris, 1974) at the TEA in Santa Cruz de Tenerife raises the question and proposes an answer. A month has coincided with the double exhibition with June Crespo that Nogueras Blanchard showed in Barcelona. And he has done it in all his work, between architecture, installation, relational and performative. According to his lucid and articulate
glocal
approach
at the head of the TEA, its director, Gilberto González, proposed an investigation that would speak from you to you in the rooms with the excellent permanent collection and with the symbolic and economic identity of the islands as a playground and leisure of Europe.
Work and leisure time, compartmentalized in the 20th century, have been mixed in the 21st, physically and symbolically. When people sneakily update their networking profiles while working, are they "resting" or still working for corporations that cash in on their data? And does he "rest" and stop "producing" compulsively watching series in his bedrooms? In the brightest room of his project at the TEA, Condorelli juxtaposes his specifically designed lounging furniture inspired by Dutch Van Eyck's post-war playground gadgets with the legendary video
Semiotics of the kitchen.
, by Martha Rosler, and with the filming of workers leaving a factory by Allan Sekula, both from the TEA: the forms of exploitation mutate in order to follow the pattern of those filmed by the Lumière in 1895;
the home kitchen is now an unpaid “care industry” and attributed by inertia to women doubly confined to houses where the man appropriates the best room;
In the walk through the art center, everything seems aseptic and edifying leisure, but the work of the technicians who make it possible is made invisible.
Distance sex
The allusion to Van Eyck recalls the seminal group
Playgrounds
of the Reina Sofía, which in 2014 vindicated his work and the political urgency of preserving physical and mental spaces for leisure: that inefficient non-activity that post-covid late-capitalism takes advantage of to optimize (and come on word of mouth) ). Another expo of the Reina,
Manhattan, mixed use
, 10 years ago gave historical context and political meaning to the news that now announces the bumps in the price of offices in New York and other global cities. To the tenant companies and real estate companies that
gentrified
so many cheap neighborhoods are no longer interested in paying those rents that they themselves made more expensive. Of course not! Now they can atomize them and relocate them among their thousands of bubble-workers, in the heat of a telework whose regulation would make necessary collective bargaining that traps employees with obsolete or dismantled structures and laws. The riders (another cool word for the errand boy of a lifetime) already live on their meat and their thighs and fight and pedal judicially as a result of the closure of bars and restaurants and small shops. Sex, idle and glorious, whose physical and political spaces analyzed
1,000 m2 of desire
in 2017
At the CCCB, it is now produced and consumed remotely, at OnlyFans or Chaturbate or Cam4, where the idea of prostitution is confused and everyone can be sex workers and clients while respecting health distances. The fateful question is no longer needed: do you have a place?
Is the game a creative strategy?
Or, God forbid, is it
art?
Can it continue to be a form of political resistance?
Or are we turning leisure into business to the last loophole, and paradoxically adults into perennial children, addicted to ultra-sophisticated toys and prisoners of a trivialized social and political life in endless screen bubbles?
When Pavese said, sibylline and prophetic, that "working is tiring", perhaps he was expressing in negative a paradox that Condorelli and his generation of artists can help us to elucidate.
Resting has us exhausted.
Either we take and defend our leisure and games very seriously, or with or without COVID we will lose its political and liberating power.
'Two years of vacation'.
Céline Condorelli.
TORCH.
Santa Cruz of Tenerife.
Until June 13.
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