Labour, Class and Institutional Violence. Three Scenes from the Spanish Artistic System

Abstract

Through the analysis of three cases: an artistic production, a judicial labour claim and a mediation and research project, this article addresses how the Spanish art system is built on precariousness and the reproduction of the social order. The first scene takes as its starting point the video «The Rules of the Game» [«Las reglas del juego»] (2022) where the Galician artist María Ruido analyses how, through the erasure of class and the invisibilisation of the material conditions of artists, the existing inequality in cultural production is perpetuated. The fiction of meritocracy creates a mirage of equal opportunities, when in fact it serves as an alibi to justify structural inequality. In an exercise close to autoethnography, the central scene of the essay traces the author’s working life as if it were a piece of the history of work in culture in contemporary Spain, characterised by institutional violence and the judicialisation of labour claims. The third scene analyses the project «Working Conditions» (MACBA, 2021-2022) in which artists and educators designed a research programme about the conditions of art production in the city of Barcelona.