Labor and Work in Architecture

摘要

In 2011 the artists Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann initiated a project titled Labour in a Single Shot in which they invited artists and filmmakers to produce one- or two-minute-long videos about labor in all its possible forms. As Farocki and Ehmann wrote in their call for participation, "The subject of investigation is 'labour': paid and unpaid, material and immaterial, rich in tradition or altogether new."~1 This project resulted in a myriad of videos shot in different parts of the world that showed the ubiquity of labor—from dancing to sex work, from studying to cleaning, from talking to cycling. What emerges from all these videos is an understanding of labor not as a form of specialized activity that takes place in a specialized workplace, but as the generic and abstract capability to do something with the mind and the body. Labour in a Single Shot is a powerful critique of how labor is exploited precisely because it has been made ubiquitous within contemporary forms of production. And yet, confronted with the incommensurable nature of contemporary labor, the participating artists and filmmakers attempted to represent it nonetheless, precisely in order to provide an account of how labor always exceeds what capital pretends to acknowledge and compensate.