Worker: The iteration game or coming out of the eternal return

Abstract

Originally, Worker was a durational performance that emerged at the end of a contract as a labourer in a retirement home. This performance uses a recording loop of the experience testimony and experiments with a process of iteration within a mimetic re-enactment of the repetitive actions and gestures of the cleaning work. In the absence of any equipment, in the imaginary space of a room whose boundaries and furniture were drawn on the ground, the performance at ‘vacuum’ seeks less to represent than to outgrow what the working experience represents in a synthesis of the past and present time. This performance-research therefore allows an epistemic claim about what the experience of work, in that vast machinery of capitalism based on subjection and exploitation, represents, means and implies within a process of subjectivization, and how a game of iteration could become a cathartic experience. Iteration is the process of a performance that opens and explores the social play, the man’s potential alienation in the ‘machinic’ enslavement and subjection devices of capitalism, and experiences the borders of the representation and mimesis, the coming out of the eternal return over time.

Notes

1 Sign6 is a non-profit performative art space that develops a members community and hosts artists in residence. Being an artists initiative, Sign6 revolves around experiments, artistic processes and practice based experiences, see www.sign6.org.

2 According to René Girard, human behaviour consists of relations between imitation, competition and mimetic rivalries between subjects, countries and cultures. It is the origin of all sacrificial violence in society. The mimetic desire is the source of all conflicts, of all ‘rivalrous’ competition to obtain the same object of desire that gives birth to the cycle of fury and revenge that are soothed in the sacrifice of a ‘scapegoat’.

3 The notion of dis-identification that Preciado borrows from De Lauretis aims to deconstruct the process of identification, to undo the dominant modes of subjectification to open the way for new sexual topics, epistemics and policies (De Lauretis 1990: np).