On Labour

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This reader is a culmination of direct and tangential deliberations on labour. Notions of labour appreciated across geographies and mediums. Newly commissioned textual manifestations in a multilogue with historical positions. The reader could be perceived as a negotiation of positions, as the strive towards utterances, towards becoming. Each text could be imagined as a stanza in a song. This is also a strive towards musicality. Or at least a wish for this reader to be a choir, in which we collectively sing, in which we all listen to each other to be able to sing, but most importantly, in which we afford ourselves the privilege of ?hearing the eloquence of silence?, ?seeing the inner vision beneath the closed eyes? and ?listening to the chastity of inner music that defies betrayal by the wayward wind.?00In the conception of Sonsbeek, we are not interested in producing evidences of any sort, and hardly are we interested in claiming the position of the presenter, the one who holds forth. In itself, this implies a structuring of subject and object, thus subjectification and objectification, which tends to be hierarchical. This comes along with: How can one move away from this God-like position of the sole creator to then present to those that just consume, and shift towards a collective experience of creating and perceiving together? It is not the curators that have the genius to come up with an idea that is then realised by artists to be later consumed by an audience, but it is a collective exchange of ideas in a kind of noosphere, or a collective body of people?artists, visitors of all walks of life, curators?that together form a collective brain.00Exhibition: Sonsbeek international contemporary art exhibition, Arnhem, The Netherlands (02.07.-30.08.2021)