Labour and Leisure is the first in the series of Alternativa. Anthology publications, accompanying the exhibitions organised within the festival framework. This one is the theoretical complement, which undertakes the most important issues tackled during the festival in 2011, as well as a part of 2012 – the questions about the changes of working models and the complicate relation between these models and the economics of time. The three chapters: The Effort of Rest, Koinonia and Where would you like to go today? contain tests through which one may have a closer look at the contemporary situation of working / labour from the perspective of economic and historical conditions, embraced by the two eponymous notions: labour and free time. Additionally, such issues as co-operation and intellectual work, with contemporary artistic practice as an example, are tackled in these chapters, along with the future of labour as such. The title of the last chapter Where would you like to go? is the slogan of Microsoft Co. from the heroic beginnings of the epoch of internet bulb; today, it is one of the key questions of contemporary societies. It hides the emigrants’ anxiety about their work, as well as precarious white-collar workers and artist, along with the problems related to the dwindling sector of physical work.

The book also contains reprinted material, texts which have yet not been translated and interviews of such authors as: Max Weber, Cornelius Castoriadis, Keti Czuchrow, Borys Arwatow, Hito Steyerl, Paul Lafargue, Ben Kafka, Geert Lovink, Henri Lefebvre, Slavoj Žižek or David Graeber

Supervising editor of Alternativa Editions: Krzysztof Gutfrański
Graphic desing/ layout: Tomasz Bersz i Marian Misiak

This book is a spinoff of the Estrangement exhibition that took place at the Wyspa Institute of Art in Gdansk, Poland, in May – September 2011. The exhibition is, in turn, an off-shoot of the eponymous art project that developed since 2008, bridging Eastern and Western Europe and Iraqi Kurdistan. Polish curator, Aneta Szyłak and Kurdish artist, Hiwa K, are the initiators of this endeavour. (…) This book is a multi-disciplinary – inevitable incomplete and possibly uncompletable – reflection in the notion of estrangement. In order to be faithful to the very nature of the concept that produces it, the Reader takes inspiration from Szyłak’s and Hiwa K’s project while also betraying it in relation to some of the directions it takes.*


Contributors: Sara Ahmed, Akkas al-Ali, Cihat Arinc, Swietłana Boym, John Cage, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Hiwa K, Kabir, Elżbieta Matynia, Diane E.King, Francesca Recchia, Wiktor Szkłowski, Aneta Szyłak, Leire Vergara


Editor: Francesca Recchia
Supervising editor of Alternativa Editions: Krzysztof Gutfrański
Design and typesetting: Tomasz Bersz i Marian Misiak

Price 30 zł + p&p
You can order the book at the address: sekretariat@wyspa.art.pl
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