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Gathering practitioners from artistic, curatorial and theoretical fields, a group of artworks and audience members, the three-day program of various figurations, included performances, conversations, a site visit, roundtables, video screenings and physical exercise, linking current practices and discourses of arts-based research with thematic and topographic contexts of the Keep Frozen research project.

In a meeting with the Leipzig based editorial group of the magazine outside the box, the symposium took a departure point in intersectional feminist perspectives on the politics of labor and forms of knowledge production in relation to social hierarchies and biopolitics.

Drawing from critical theory and examples of artistic practice, Jonatan Habib-Engqvists contribution addressed ‘work’ as a potential form of fabricated agency and regarded its physical symptoms to demystify the concept of ‘immaterial labor’.

With EIE-The Class (Dafna Maimon) queer approaches to the body and its performance in the production of images, identities, definitions of self and other were invited to gain understanding of contemporary body intimacies with technological, economic and corporeal infrastructures.

A territory of passage undergoing social and ecological transformations, the North Atlantic Ocean was discussed as a shifting geopolitical entity with members of the transdisciplinary research project Occupational Hazard. Its material and mythological meaning as infrastructure and resource resonates in the streams of technology and capital, the diasporic histories, the desires and discourses that cross its waters.

Embodiments of the queer, eco-sexual, inter-species, spiritual and scientific that inhabit a different shoreline in Between the Waves (Tejal Shah) stimulated imaginaries of fluid forms of existence between archaic and futuristic realms.

Based on these topical fields and their crossings, the roundtables with Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir, Emma Haugh, Anne Hofmann, Suza Husse, Sören Kjörup, Dafna Maimon and Nine Eglantine Yamamoto-Masson provided a framework to reflect arts-based research in terms of methodologies and narratives, economies and environments, power structures and affects.

The group of artworks participating in these translational set-ups were invited to be interlocutors in their own right: They introduced scenes of transition in the scope of the symposium, such as the moments of the fish unfreezing from its immobilized and packaged state in the transactions and journeys of Labor Move. Together with these examples of artistic research, the participants in the Hydra Reading Troupe Workshop #01 SPEAKING AS FISHES (Emma Haugh & Suza Husse) which concluded the symposium, animated the fish as a presence of (neo)colonial currency traversing oceans, bodies and forms of knowledge as well as a fluid site for reimagining interdependencies and interspecies relationships.

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Keep Frozen is an art-practice-as research project by Icelandic contemporary visual artist Hulda Rós Gudnadóttir exploring harbor aesthetics, the conditions of manual dock labor and the artist’s practice as research. The exhibition at Kunstkraftwerk (KKW) was the third in the Keep Frozen exhibition series, presenting the artist’s project in Germany for the first time.

Keep Frozen part three opened with a 48 hour performance by a team of dock workers. At KKW they worked the same hours with the same breaks as they do at the harbor in Reykjavik where they typically are required, within a tight 48 hour period, to unload up to 25.000 boxes of frozen fish from freezer factory trawlers (each weighing 25 kg) whilst working in a -35° C freezer cargo hold. The boxes are much heavier than those allowed inside the EU and they are paid according to how fast they work. Security rules are waived as they keep spinning. In an endless cycle of repetitive movements they re-stack boxes continuously as fast as possible from one pile to the next in a ritualistic dance within the 500m2 post-industrial exhibition space. It is an inhumanly difficult task that is carried out with a precise level of skill and experience that few outside the dock are able to achieve.

The performance was filmed partly by the same team that has been making a documentary about the dock workers in their 'natural' dock environment for the last few years. This time the film crew focused on abstracting the movements and aesthetic traits of the labour. Their movements, gestures and sounds were recorded in high quality formats that could be projected again into the same space as a massive 3-channel synchronised video installation on 7 meters high portrait format screens. Together with the left-overs of the performance, scattered straps and 160 worn out boxes distributed on pallets throughout the space, the videos formed a mixed-media installation that reminded the audience of the absence of the workers.

The third part of the Keep Frozen series was a conceptually complex art-piece working on many layers. Apart from the ongoing questions about labour and harbour aesthetics in this addition to the series workers as subjects were being re-contextualised and restaged in the artistic space that ironically used to be a space for workers. The performance and the installation not only poses questions about the space where it takes place and the meaning of showing labour but also wider artistic questions.

What is (re)presentation?
What is (re)staging?
What is re-en(act)ment?
What is (re)production?
- in relation to reality/space/cinema?

The performance was developed with the help of Hinrik Thor Svavarsson, an ex-dock worker turned professional dramaturg with the creative input of dock-workers Jens Pétur Kjærnested, Davíð Svavarsson, Valur Ísak Antonsson and Sigurður Gáki Árnason. The film concept was developed in collaboration with DOP Dennis Helm, editor Kinga Kielczynska and sound designer André Zacher. 

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Keep Frozen part three eröffnet mit einer 48-stündigen Performance von einer Gruppe von Hafenarbeitern und einem Filmteam. Beim KKW werden die Hafenarbeiter dieselben Arbeitszeiten einschließlich der Pausen einhalten, zu denen sie am Reykjavíker Hafen arbeiten. Üblich ist, daß sie dort im engen Zeitrahmen von 48 Stunden bis zu 25.000 Kisten gefrorenen Fisch à 25 Kilo aus den Frosttrawlern entladen, dabei arbeiten sie in einem Kühlfrachtraum bei -35°C. Die Kisten sind viel schwerer als EU-Richtlinien erlauben, und wie im Hafen, werden sie auch hier entsprechend ihres Arbeitstempos bezahlt. Sicherheitsmaßnahmen sind außer Kraft gesetzt, während die Arbeiter sich fortlaufend drehen. In einem endlosen Kreislauf wiederholter Bewegungen stapeln sie Kisten so schnell sie können von einem Stoß zum nächsten, in einem ritualistischen Tanz in der 500m² großen postindustriellen Ausstellungshalle. Es ist eine unmenschlich schwierige Aufgabe, die sich zunehmend dramatisiert, und mit einem hohen Niveau von Präzision und Erfahrung ausgeführt wird, die nur wenige außerhalb des Hafens erreichen könnten.

Die Performance wird zum Teil vom selben Filmteam aufgenommen, der seit einigen Jahren an einem Dokumentarfilm über die Hafenarbeiter in ihrem „natürlichen“ Arbeitsumfeld arbeitet. Die Arbeiter, Hauptfiguren des Dokumentarfilms, werden nun aus ihrem Ursprungskontext entrissen und neu inszeniert, an einem Austellungsort, das ironischerweise ein Arbeitsort für Arbeiter war. Die Performance wirft nicht nur Fragen über ihren Handlungsort auf, sondern auch breiter gefächerte künstlerische Fragestellungen. Was ist (Re)Präsentation? Was ist (Neu)Inszenierung? Was ist Re-en(act)ment? Was ist Re(Produktion)? Wie steht es um das Verhätlnis von diesen Themen zu Realität/Raum/Kino? Das Filmteam rückt die Abstrahierung der Bewegungsabläufe und Ästhetiken der Hafenarbeit in den Fokus: indem die Arbeiter und ihre Bewegungen dekontextualisiert werden, werden ihre Bewegungen, Gesten und Geräusche für uns klar sichtbar und hörbar. In einem unglaublich kurzen Zeitraum – zwei Wochen – verwandelt das Filmteam die Aufnahmen in einen Experimentalfilm, der als Videoinstallation und „work in process“
am 22. Januar 2016 im KKW eröffnet.

Die Performance wird in Zusammenarbeit mit Hinrik Thor Svavarsson entwickelt, selbst ein ehemaliger Hafenarbeiter, der nun als professioneller Dramaturg tätig ist.

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Figuration I: Feminist Perspectives on Work and Knowledge

A meeting with outside the box - Magazin für feministische Gesellschaftskritik @ MONALiesA Feministische Bibiothek, Haus der Demokratie, Bernhard-Göring-Straße 152, 04277 Leipzig

At the feminist library MONALiesA, founded in Leipzig in 1990, we joined the publishers of outside the box - feminist magazine for social critique - in one of their Fridays work meetings. To discuss current politics of labor and knowledge, the gathering evolved along the fourth issue of outside the box, which was published in 2013: ARBEIT (work/ labor) and emerged from the “awake desire to criticize what makes us tired” and collects different voices of intersectional emancipatory critique on the topic of labor and female subjectivity, for example in the context of (post-)socialism, of migrant labor and of social imagination beyond labor.

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