Matteo Montaldo
Keywords: Photography, Labour, Politics
What does work look like when it has no clear workplace, no fixed schedule, and no obvious beginning or end? In what ways can the work of artists, freelancers and other cultural producers be depicted in photographs?
Exhibitions, artworks, events, and publications are visible. The labour that makes them possible is less so. This project looks at cultural workers not through outputs, but through the backstage: the spaces, the time, and the material circumstances that make their work possible.
Over the last decades, work has expanded into more and more areas of life. Work is everywhere, and for this very reason, it often tends to go unrecognised. This is particularly evident in the case of cultural workers, people involved in the production and circulation of culture. It is difficult to say which factory they are leaving at the end of the day—not because they work less than others, but because the boundaries between work, personal life, passion, and self-management are often blurred.
The project develops around a tension between collective and individual forms of labour. Labour can only be understood collectively, as a fabric of relations and dependencies. Yet it is increasingly experienced as an individual condition.
The collective dimension has historically been depicted through images of groups posing together. In my case, I searched for situations of gathering among cultural workers and represented these moments through multiple images taken within the same space, later assembled into panoramic views. In this way, not only the event itself becomes relevant, but also the space and the objects present within it—elements that are often underestimated and unseen.
The individual dimension is made up of portraits of people in what might be defined as moments of work. The images often occupy an in-between position. They are neither traditional portraits nor conventional representations of workers performing their jobs. In a broader sense, they are, perhaps, portraits influenced by attention deficit disorder. Labour is visible, but perhaps not recognisable as such.
This ambiguity is intentional, reflecting the difficulty of recognising work, and of representing it photographically, within the contemporary historic juncture.
