SPIN: Imagine Work!
SPIN invites you to a gathering in Brussels on 8 June, titled Imagine Work!
The focus of the day is to meet with 20–30 people, and together to wrap our imaginations around what ‘working’ might mean in an ideal, even utopic future.
If the current constraints and realities of working today were exploded and swept to one side – from this tabula rasa what could you imagine in its place? What matters to you when you work? How do you want to experienced time? Which conditions (realistic or fantastic) would meet these desires?… Three-hour workdays? An outcome every few years, or minutes? Works that exist but never 'premiere'? No link between work and pay, or payment in something other than money?
SPIN proposes this imagination-experiment as a reflection and reaction towards the much-discussed condition of the ‘flexible worker’. The phenomena of flexworking is said to have liquidated the borders between life and work, friend and colleague, leisure and labour. Many links are drawn between the negative impact of this unstable, individualistic work condition and it’s relation to capitalist and neoliberal agendas. Meanwhile workers in the arts and creative fields apparently typify (some say prototype) this flexible, self-reliant and adaptable individual as they sprint from one project deadline to another – working in offices, studios and bars, in rehearsals and receptions, available any hour of the day.
But if the arts spawned some of these practices, then why not others? For this gathering, SPIN wants to offer participants a playful yet incisive space to imagine radically different possibilities together. By releasing ourselves from practical constraints for a moment and committing to utopist strategies we mean to stimulate our thinking about work and production. Partly based on the outcome of this day, SPIN will organise a public event around the same content in Kaaitheater in September.
