Soft economies - A conversation with Felipe Steinberg

Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others, Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of The Critical Practices Program in fall 2019. The truth is it is not easy to transmit an open ended process of relationing, which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series, I'll be speaking with the Onassis participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs, as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

In this conversation, I am very happy to welcome Felipe Steinberg. Felipe is a visual artist whose work focuses on systems of representation through various media that explore the constructed meanings of the local and the global. Felipe is a participant of The School of Infinite Rehearsals Movement VII with a collective research focus on economies through the lens of community economies. Today, we will discuss about invisible forms of labor and its redistribution towards an economy of care.

Felipe, welcome to Pali-Room!

Thank you so much Myrto. I am very happy to be here.

It's very nice to have you here with me today. I would like to start with your artistic practice. I've observed through the conversations that we had so far that labor time and leisure time have been an ongoing thread throughout your practice, as well as your insistence to look for all the negative spaces, the absences, or the in-between spaces that often remain invisible. And if I want to look at your connection with the notion of economies, I would say it is through your interest into the circulation and distribution of this invisible matter of affective labor. I am curious to know how you started engaging with these notions, but also what artistic strategies you employ to make the invisible visible again.

Right. I think this notion of —I would call it— mediation issues would be related to an experience that I had in 2001. On the day of September 11, that happened in New York, in the same morning, the mayor of my city was murdered for unclear reasons. And although these two events are not connected, I think from that moment it created this third space in between two worlds —the US, New York and my city, Campinas—, because that day we didn't know why we were not going to school. Was it because of the local thing or something that happened abroad? That time we didn't have Internet. So it [the event] was mediated through TV or newspapers. There was a certain delay, you know, in between what's happening, what's actually happening and who is talking on behalf of whom. Today, things have shifted a lot, of course, because people somewhat talk for themselves through the Internet. I think since then, I have been interested in this idea of distortion, of how this kind of way with which I started perceiving that day was very much influenced by this coincidence, let's say, and how my cognition, my perception was affected by how things were mediated. So, I realized that the mythology around the story occupies a kind of real space, you know, —what's being talked or what's not being talked about— and these invisible things. So, I think this was the beginning of this interest and somewhat this was brought me to labor somehow. These ideas of mediation and labor, I think, are pretty much a realm of human existence that is very important as to define who we are. We always define ourselves through our work and I think this also creates a sort of distortion. We internalize these things and we start perceiving —sometimes because of ideological reasons or personal reasons—, things as not labor, but they actually are. I think I naturally move from this mediation within this media coverage towards the mediation of how we transform the world. That's labor perhaps.

Was this also a way for you to reflect on your work as an artist? Because our work often remains invisible in the realm of art.

Yes, it's true. I am very interested in this invisibility, but I would call it —for me it is confusing now, if I should use this word or not— latency, when there is something beating and you have to, as an artist, offer some paths or some links and put things that don't belong together together and then ask the people you're engaging with to construct with you something.

But I guess this distortion also allows for new connections to be made and fiction is an artistic strategy that you often use to bring this kind of issues together. I am wondering if you could give a specific example of a previous work where you're using it to bring forward these issues.

How I would phrase this is that there is a certain reality that comes to me as an external person and I have to catch up with this reality. And as soon as I am able, through the work, to catch up with this reality, then I can go over it. So, I think, this is the process of what we could call fiction. First, you catch up. Then, you move a bit forward and this moving forward most of the times, I think, can bring a hopeful option to the table. And then I think that's where fiction comes about.

For example, while living in Chicago I became friends with Catherine, a massage therapist that has her massage parlor next to where I used to live in Humboldt Park. At the time, I was interested in doing a sort of documentary about Catherine. She was born in China and immigrated to Chicago in 2005. Her parlor offers four kinds of massages: sports massage, foot massage, Swedish massage and happy ending massage. Only the happy ending massage is not advertised on the window of the parlor. At the time, I was specifically interested in the waiting time within her work. She told me that what she really dislikes about her job is the waiting time between customers, where she either plays Candy Crush, cleans the parlor, or traces an old Barnes and Noble copy of "Moby Dick; or the Whale". Catherine literally handwrites on top of each printed letter of the book, that very same letter again and again: an 'a' for an 'a', a 'b' for a 'b', etc. The fact that she was doing this repetitive process with Moby Dick really fascinated me and the project sort of rerouted towards a complete new direction.

So, I got very fascinated by "Moby Dick" as well. I knew of Melville from other contexts and works. But I think what fascinated me in the book a lot was how detailed and how obsessive and technical he was about the details of fishing, the whale hunting and then, of course, this fight of men with God and all the things we know of the book. The book itself is very epic because it's very thick. It stands on itself, literally. It is around 600 pages, more or less. And then, somewhat I started digging into how the book was made and I found out that Melville himself had, let's call it, helpers, his wife and his sisters in order to transcribe the manuscript of the book that he was writing every day in order to send it to the publisher. It was said that his handwriting was apparently very bad. I got really interested in this family endeavor, whereas all this work was invisible and somewhat I wanted to resurface this story, but through the lens of my own personal history, that I think I need to bring up. Somewhat this untold story of how the book was produced resonated a lot with the 'fictional book' itself.

On the other hand, in the US, these massage parlors on the outside have all these ads that convey ideas of health care and stuff and you don't really know what's happening inside. So, I was very interested in this idea that it is illegal to do what happens inside the massage parlor, but outside they convey this idea of health and a holistic view. But we all know what happens inside. And for you perhaps that listens now who doesn't know, as I said, there are a lot of massage parlors that do these so-called happy ending massages, where usually men go to get a massage.

So, I went there and I proposed to Catherine if she would be willing to let me publish the book as a facsimile. At the time, there was a big chunk of the book left still to be done, so I engaged with her in two senses. I encouraged her to finish what was left and in order to do that I asked her to suggest a price and she came up with the idea of charging the same amount she would charge for the massage hour —therefore, it was $70 an hour. We also decided that I would stay with her while she was doing the writing and that we would hang out together. After the book was finished, she charged me for all the work she did before I showed up in the parlor and for the work that she did after. In total, I was charged for 44 hours.

I think the initial choice, an inclination towards a massage parlor and a sexual worker has to do with my own personal history. That is something that I have to deal with from the place I am from. How my masculinity was build is very connected to this world and something that I felt I have to deal with. So, I think there are a lot of untold stories that I didn't want to resurface then. Also, in the background, I kept thinking about this idea of the palimpsest, of things that are repeated not through erasure, but as superimposition. So, when you are repeating them, instead of clarifying them you're making them more complicated, because you're writing on top of something that's already there. It blurs many memories. So, I was trying to merge this history of the US as an empire manifested in the book "Moby Dick", my own personal narrative and the life of this friend, which was Catherine, and of course, of all the sisters and the wife of Melville himself.

I worked on this series of coincidences, basically, that maybe are not so coincident at the end of the day. And I expanded those coincidences. Something was already there somewhat. So, the published book is a way for me to catch up with this reality. Then, I can go over it. Currently, the book can be acquired for its print cost price. There are no editions, but virtually, as far as it is printable, it is an endless supply kind of thing. The book is signed by me and Catherine. In that sense, we are co-authors in a very specific way. Maybe I perceive myself more as a publisher, I guess. (The book is not available yet to be bought, but soon it will be).

And lastly, this book, just for you to understand it as an image, it is written on top of the original book. It is repeated. But then, for the most remarkable interactions, I wrote notes on the sides of the pages. So, it conveys the idea of these misunderstandings: what we were talking about, what the subject matter is. I can tell a little story that can convey how we were on the same page, but not really, I guess. For example, one day someone knocked really hard on the door. It really felt it was the police, because what she does is not legal. And then she came to me, she hugs me and says: "Felipe, don't worry. Just stay calm." Moments of rupture and expectation. So, these little interactions I wrote them in those notes to convey these empty spaces, these unimportant moments that actually are very important manifestations of something, I think.

Going back to this relational aspect of economies, I would like to ask you, how do you connect with the term community economies that was also the main subject focus of The School of Infinite Rehearsals and how did that resonate with you before you applied, but also now, after the seven weeks?

What community and economies would mean for me in relation to this, but expanding a bit, would be to think individually how to maintain all this history I personally have and how to cope with things that I am not necessarily proud of, but somewhat I have to deal with and all these symptoms that we all have. To work through the symptoms. Not erase them. And I think the angle of interest that I came here with was thinking through perhaps this economy, not literally of economic goods, but the economy of perhaps these debts that we have with each other, that are affective debts, like when I'm late to meet you, I feel guilty. What do you do with this debt? Or situations in many families where someone in the family takes care of the elderly more than the others and so in the trajectory of these interpersonal relations, where two people meet, they bring all this luggage and there is a certain context. So this was my angle of approach towards community economies, that I was trying to propose, but I think we ended up in many other directions.

Another angle that you wanted to bring into the discussion —I don't know if it actually happened— was claiming back the right to weariness?

Yes. I think this was a sort of —I have to admit— a speculative proposition. I mean, this is not my idea, but I read over the book, titled The Neutral by Roland Barthes. Also, this idea is in one article that I read from this scholar called Joan Copjec. She mentioned Barthes, but also she's talking about Abbas Kiarostami's films and how the time of the film is perceived. And I think this idea of fatigue and weariness is a philosophical proposition. So, I am not really talking here about daily work —9 to 5—, but thinking through film perhaps discursively, philosophically. Let's call it like that. A film that's very slow, that makes you tired through the slowness of the moving image, I think, in the end, although for some might be painful, if you really sit and watch, it might in the end reward you with some kind of creative fatigue. Weariness, in that sense, when it is chosen, also has some things that can be creative, you know, and created out of that. I think perhaps their argument would go like this: today, we don't choose to be fatigued because it's imposed on us and we perceive fatigue as something bad. Of course, under these circumstances it is, but I think it could be something that we could regain.That was what I kind of proposed to explore here, but of course, we had to be open to everything.

The way that the term community economy was coined by Gibson and Graham —and that actually inspired the title of this Movement— has a lot to do with this space of collective negotiation between all life forms and I think that The School of Infinite Rehearsals, where different people come together to immerse themselves into collective research, is such a space. So, I am curious to know from you, how was this research process? How did it develop during these seven weeks, and what were these spaces that you ended up finding all together?

I think the most fundamental thing was to understand that perhaps each one of us was trying to reproduce systems we are used to in our own lives and bring them to the group as a way we should do things. And by that I mean simple things, like from having communication tool as a group in Signal to using Google Calendar as a tool of organization. I think we very first realized that it's required for us to not take these things for granted, but to understand how each one of us perceives time. So, the community economy started from day zero, because people arrived one hour late and people wanted to leave one hour earlier. So I think this is the very ground basic thing to understand how people perceive time and how they organize their time.

Going back to this notion of the invisible time that we talked about a lot so far, to my understanding this also became the anchor that formulated somehow your collective research as a group. I would be interested to hear from you how did you decide to address this topic all together?

We were trying to narrow it down, you know, because it was very difficult and it is a very large topic (community economy). So, we narrowed it down to think what these ideas mean within the art field. And I think we are pretty much by now very aware of how things operate. We all know somewhat how people are not well paid, how a lot of works are not very well compensated, almost everything. But then we realized that the time perhaps within the art field is more —it's not even useless, because useless can be a very good thing— like a dead time, where there is no movement. It's pure stillness. We realized that this is the application time: when you're applying for something. And we were trying to think what does this time mean. Is it a time when you mortgage your present for something in the future? And I think this was something where we were like: "Okay, so what do we do with this?" And we talked a lot also about harm reduction. Of course, we all have a lot of ideas of what could be done, but in a sense, I think, we focused a lot in this idea of like: "Okay, we should try out something here in these seven weeks. What can we do? Let's maybe address this little issue in the little art world and this very insignificant thing that is the application time for artists." So, we talked a lot about this: within this realm of applying to things, what does this time mean? Because in the end, of course, in the ideal world there would be no applications. Everybody would just get accepted for everything and you could get whatever you desire in the art world any time you want. Therefore, if it is not possible, how could we operate differently, perhaps taking into consideration that maybe applications are perhaps needed. Then, how to compensate the time we spent applying to something? We were trying to think something along those lines. Or to compensate an application that was rejected. We were trying to come up with a project like this somewhat.

Did you find a way to monetize this time?

A way to monetize this time? That's the problem. We didn't, but we had some ideas where perhaps the principle of whatever project like this would look like in the future would be a principle of not asking people to justify themselves. And I think that's the position that we find [ourselves in]. A lot of times we do these things that I think noone should do —to defend or to justify why you have the rights to get this or that. So, we thought of a possible solution where you would just go and grab, if you need. And then, we thought that maybe it could be two ways. You can go and grab as you need, but it could also be that you go and you drop money there, if you have excess of money. So then it enters an idea, that maybe Amanda mentioned, that is this common pool idea. But then, we entered into a lot of other questions like: what is the scale of this project; for whom, from whom? Because we didn't even go to this page of like, "Let's talk about trust". It was not about this. We were really trying to think about how the circulation of this time and money would happen without justification. Every time you externalize these kind of things, there was a sort of speculative idea, because in the end, I think, we couldn't do anything along those lines. But we did use the budget of the project here to throw a party and within this party we got some goodies or a bag of stuff that we made available here —from wine to olive oil to bread— for whoever felt entitled to compensate themselves for this dead time that eventually they have perhaps, saying: Think about it. You don't even have to perform anything. You take it home and maybe as a sort of a rumor you talk about this in the party, because this kind of became the theme of the party. To conclude, I think we realized that we always found ourselves talking about pleasure and in the end —[speaking of] community economies as a topic— we aimed towards this idea of an economy of pleasure, let's say, and somewhat the obvious solution was to a certain extent invest in a party to close this.

Well, before we close this discussion today, I would like to ask you one last question. I am curious to know what's next for you.

I was looking at this theme before the pandemic, but I think now with the pandemic it became even more prevalent, which is the labor, again, but online. I was interested in this idea of the click workers which is this kind of underpaid online work, where it is not the home office kind of situation, but there is a lot of labor online where people work in order to make the artificial intelligence work better. This is a very repetitive work where people are for many hours doing this —clicking and doing very repetitive tasks. One aspect of this that I am interested in is the fact that a lot of people conceive this work as, what they call, 'beer money'. They claim that this work is done during leisure time. So, that's why they can accept such a low pay rate and it gets really confusing because you're allowing yourself to do this work that pays very little, because you justify to yourself that you can do it during leisure time.

Felipe, thank you very much for sharing your experience with me today. It was lovely to talk to you and I hope you will be back soon.

Thank you very much Myrto. It was very nice.

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more conversations, please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series, and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.