In 2024, WERKER COLLECTIVE is artist-in-residence at S.M.A.K.. Working at the intersection of labour, ecofeminism and the LGBTQ+ movements, the artist collective is active within diverse communities where it investigates historic and contemporary accounts of workers’ solidarity. Through collaborative methodologies and strategies of counter-archiving, they question the exclusive conditions of representation and historiography and instead advocate for a visual critique of everyday life that reactivates repressed narratives. Their joint artistic practice further includes installation, performance, video and sound work, community projects, reading groups, film clubs, radio podcasts and workshops.
At S.M.A.K., the artist collective engages the museum staff in a study group that intends to explore labour in and ‘beyond’ its current cultural form. Afterwork aims to connect recent shifts within institutional practice with underexamined perspectives on labour drawing from a reappraisal of emotional and reproductive labour, non-productive and leisure time and abolitionist views. As a collective exercise it values both reflection, exchange and co-creation, to imagine how museums can contribute to an egalitarian society; not merely through their artistic programme, but considering the labour they produce and value.
WERKER COLLECTIVE was founded in Amsterdam in 2009 by Marc Roig Blesa and Rogier Delfos. Inspired by Die Vereinigung der Arbeiterfotografen (the Association of Worker Photographers), a group of politicised photo clubs that emerged in Germany in the 1920s, the artist collective follows in the footsteps of the first socialist photography experiments in the USSR, extending to Europe, the United States and Japan. Their methods revolved around self-representation, self-publishing, image analysis, collective authorship and counter-archiving. WERKER COLLECTIVE realized projects for, among others, Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023); Manifesta 14, Kosovo (2022); Sonsbeek 20>24. Force Times Distance/On Labour and its Sonic Ecologies, Arnhem (2020) and the 5th Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art, Yekaterinburg (2019) and published ten issues of Werker Magazine to date.
