My grandmother is a small woman with big, bony hands. Her left arm has a long scar and a crooked bone because she once got it caught in a meat grinder. The older she gets the more she shrinks and the more her humpback grows. All the women in my family grow humpbacks when they get older. I think it's an effect of their work. My grandmother thinks it’s a genetic condition. She tells me I should take care of my posture so as not to end up with a humpback like her. I straighten my back for reassurance and wonder about how my own work, although different from hers, might leave me with a humpback too.
I’m reminded of my grandmother’s back standing in front of Kelly O’Brien’s No Rest For The Wicked (2022 - ongoing), which is currently on view in the exhibition “Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights” at the Wellcome Collection in London. The artist’s photographic documentation of the working-class women in her family consists of an assemblage of intimate close-ups of their everyday lives and stylized portrayals of domestic work. As an exploration of reproductive labor traced in the bodies of multiple generations of O’Brien’s family, who immigrated from Ireland to the UK, her photographs zoom into seemingly trivial details such as a hair tie, a half-closed bra zipper, a hand holding a supermarket bill, and make them sensitive, personal signifiers of their socio-economic positions. In contrast to these images, staged portraits of her family members posing with, and hiding their faces behind, their working tools indicate the self-alienation inherent to the stereotyped representation of their labor.
My grandmother’s body - just like those of O’Brien’s family members - with its physical condition and scars is a testimony to the extractive structure of capitalist accumulation and how its labor regimes and mechanisms of domination are inscribed into the body. According to Silvia Federici, to understand the history of the body under capitalism one needs to consider all the techniques that are used to discipline, commodify, and exploit it as labor power. Describing a history of the body means describing the different forms of repression that have been activated against it. Federici insists on considering this correlation to understand “the crisis our bodies are currently undergoing and, at the same time, read behind our collective and individual pathologies [to] search for new anthropological paradigms” [1].
fig. 1
“Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights”, seeks ways of reading behind such pathologies through an extensive engagement with the history of the exploitation to which the worker’s body is subjected. It is a history rooted in colonialism and racism and the long legacy of workers’ rights and resistance movements. Within a wooden structure, historical documents and objects from the museum’s collection, contemporary artworks, and new commissions are brought in relation to and conversation with each other. The exhibition’s structure focuses on three different workspaces, each of which speaks of different aspects of precarity, working conditions, and repression. They are Plantation, Street and Home. Text- and audio-based exhibition guides, as well as accompanying signs, lead visitors through the wooden labyrinth from one area to the others, contextualizing and expanding the show with additional information.
Upon entering the exhibition space I first encounter Adelita Husni Bey’s video work Gestures of Labour (2009). The video produced in the Kapungs neighborhood of Jakarta, which is mainly inhabited by migrant workers, shows sequences of working hands fulfilling repetitive tasks, weaving, stitching, or handling machines. The camera isolates the focus on working hands in their production and detaches them from the working body, which remains unknown to the viewer. All I learn about the workers portrayed in this video is through the repetitive movements of their hands. The image of these hands becoming disembodied production tools displayed in the artist’s work prompts me to reflect on how the fragmentation of the working body for the sake of capitalist accumulation relates to the archival logic in the history of Wellcome Collection itself.
Considering the archive and the pharmaceutical industry as institutions that are historically complicit in the execution of colonial and capitalistic workings against the body, it feels relevant to look into the history of the Wellcome Collection itself to situate the exhibition within the legacy of the institution. Founded in the early 20th century by Sir Henry Wellcome, whose wealth was accumulated through his pharmaceutical business, the collection’s history is deeply tied to imperial policies and colonial trading relationships. Between 1890 and 1936 Wellcome collected a tremendous number of looted indigenous medical artifacts, sacred objects, and human remains through auctions and dealer markets to tell “a global story of health and medicine” [2]. The classification system of his collection perpetuated the idea of cultural hierarchies and the superiority of European medical advancement. His archival techniques that categorize objects and knowledge according to Eurocentric standards seem to reveal analogies with the violent logic of exploitation and the fragmentation of the working body.
fig. 2
The Wellcome Collection’s efforts in recent decades to address and take responsibility for the collection's violent history, facilitate restitution, and critically revise its practices are also reflected in this show. By making most of its holdings publicly accessible and inviting members of source communities to engage with and reclaim their cultural heritage, the institution seeks to reconcile with its past [3]. With its focus on necropolitical domination, exploitation, and medical violence “Hard Graft…” seems to align with this endeavor, contributing to the reevaluation of the collection's own history. Archival material from the Collection is included in the exhibition and put in relation to contemporary artworks, in ways that seek to create new relationships between past and present. If, following Federici, the struggle of the working body “must begin with the re-appropriation of our body, the revaluation and rediscovery of its capacity for resistance, and expansion and celebration of its powers, individual and collective” [4], I wonder if the same applies to a restitutional approach to the museum's collection.
How can a focus on the inherent capacity of the objects to resist an imposed system of division and de-contextualization support a critical revision of the collection? Could this resistance be found in the objects themselves?
The works of contemporary artists in this show not only address or oppose the violence inherent to the history of those documents but also re-appropriate the narrative and thereby the working body itself. Entering the area dedicated to the heading Plantation, which reveals the roots of capitalist disembodiment in colonial enslavement, I encounter one such confrontation between Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq’s Dark Garden Series (2021 - ongoing), and a black and white photograph depicting enslaved people working on a plantation in the Paraiba Valley region. Reproducing a romanticized colonizer's view of an exotic landscape, this photograph, taken in 1882, normalizes and aestheticizes the violence, dehumanization and exploitation inherent to this photograph. Dark Garden, which is displayed on the wall opposite to this photograph, disturbs this brutal romanticisation of a landscape by opposing it with his own documentation of plantation workers in Bangladesh and their bodies’ injuries and scars. One of his photographs depicts a worker sitting on a severely pollarded tree staring back at the camera. While one of the worker’s hands holds his leg, his other arm rests on the cut-off branch. Although the position of the photographer could be read as similarly distant and the depicted man as aligned with the landscape, the firmness of his gaze seems to both recognize the destruction of the landscape and resist his objectification through the camera. Here both the photographer and photographed seem to reclaim a unity between body and land, resisting the body’s separation from the land and nature, which is as inherent to capitalist exploitation as it is to colonial extraction.
fig. 3
Industrial forces aligned against bodies and land are uncovered in the video If toxic air is a monument to slavery, how do we take it down? (2021) by Forensic Architecture. Their investigation into the air pollution caused by industrial complexes in Louisiana was commissioned by RISE, an activist group of local residents who live along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. As descendants of historically enslaved people in the so-called “Petrochemical Corridor” the proliferation of industry not only exposes them to severe health risks but also threatens the destruction of their homes and their ancestors’ burial grounds. FA’s tracing of cemeteries in earlier maps, scientific investigations of air pollution, and medical statistics support the persistent fight of RISE against the destruction of their land, their own displacement, and the subsequent health risks to which residents are exposed. Proving the severe repercussions and continuation of the area's history of slavery becomes especially crucial because of its invisible workings. The narrator’s statement “Like the climate of racism, toxic air pollution is almost invisible to the eye,” thereby indicating how the reappropriation of control over bodies and land must go hand in hand to fight the environmental racism posed by industry.
The second area, dedicated to the Street, addresses different forms of labor in public space, which often remain unrecognized and unvalued, for example, sanitation work, or others that are criminalized such as sex work. A huge altar-like installation in the middle of the space, reminiscent of an obscure mix of an amusement park installation, an abandoned cathedral, and a souvenir shop draws me closer. On pews, ceramic money boxes are placed. These are shaped like souvenir items and bear inscriptions including “The contagious disease’s act”, and “Stop shaming us to death”. Behind these two-color stained glass windows depicting distorted biblical scenes frame a screen on which - instead of a priest’s sermon - a monologue plays historical narratives, personal and collective experiences of sex work that too often remain unknown. Developed in collaboration with Polly Blake and Juno Mac from SWARM collective and the author and actor Mendez, Lyndsey Mendick’s Money makes the world go round (2024) honors the labor that, despite having always formed a fundamental function within capitalism, has been systemically stigmatized and criminalized.
The tension between the beauty of remembrance and the brutal forces of criminalization becomes especially tangible in the corresponding archival material. A series of etchings entitled Prostitutes with their names and charges from the early 17th century makes me wonder about the context of their production. While each picture is marked with the criminal charges written next to each person’s portraits, the delicateness of the detailed depiction of their beautiful dresses and appearances overshines their stigmatization. Despite their brutal function, these etchings preserve the legacy of the depicted women’s lives and work in the face of their social systemic erasure. This legacy, connecting sex workers over decades and centuries in their fights and struggles for self-determination, is celebrated on a huge billboard in the exhibition. Documents, photographs, and archival material shed light on The English Collective of Prostitutes, SMARM collective’s and other movements’ activism claiming public space to resist an often predominant victimizing narrative of sex work and the societal stigma ascribed to their bodies.
fig. 4
Sylvia Federici ends “Beyond the Periphery of the Skin” with a celebration of the body’s capacities to reunite what capitalism has divided. By highlighting the body as a “natural limit” to exploitation which is structured by desires and needs, she opens the understanding of bodies under capitalism towards our abilities to resist, disobey, organize, and change: “Since the power to be affected and to effect, to be moved and to move, a capacity that is indestructible, exhausted only with death, is constitutive of the body, there is an immanent politics residing in it: the capacity to transform itself, others, and change the world" [5].
Following Federici, I want to end this text with the celebration of all the depictions of collective resistance, workers' uprising, and labor rights movements displayed in the show, of which the following are only a few examples. Bouba Touré’s photograph “Our lives and struggles”(1980-2000), honors the migrant-led workers’ movements in Paris, whose resolute fights and resistance paved the way for improved rights for all workers in France. Louise Rocabert’s Women of Ibis Batignolles (2020), which documents the strikes of 40 chambermaids at the Ibis Batignolles hotel in Paris, and the documentation of the International Wages for Housework Campaign (1995) both celebrate the uprising against the devaluation of reproductive labor and demands for adequate compensation from various movements across the world. While these works beautifully document the legacy of reunified bodies, these pictures direct the attention outside of the museum where transformation is catalyzed by disobedience.
When I leave the show ruminating on the limitations of representing a reunification of fragmented bodies in a museum context, a small notation of a resistance song by enslaved people in Barbados remains with me. Transcribed by the English abolitionist Granville Sharp and owned by Gloucestershire Archives, this document acts as a reminder that a museum might be able to archive the (dispossessed) material manifestation of resisting bodies, categorize and display it, but it is nonetheless incapable of owning the resistance itself. Reflecting on how the reverberation of the song remains with resisting bodies that sing, recount, and hear it, proves that the immanent capacity of the body to reunite what capitalism has divided cannot be contained by the museum, the collection, or the archive. Instead, it happens when bodies gather in the streets, on the fields, and elsewhere to carry on the material manifestation of their needs and desires, in limbs, lungs, ears, vocal cords, and movements that pose an embodied limit to exploitation.
//
- Footnotes
[1] Silvia Federici, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism (Binghamton: PM Press, 2020), 76.
[2] https://wellcomecollection.org/about-us/the-colonial-roots-of-our-collections--and-our-response (last accessed: 04.12.2024).
[3] https://wellcomecollection.org/about-us/the-colonial-roots-of-our-collections--and-our-response (Last accessed: 04.12.2024).
[4] Silvia Federici, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism (Binghamton: PM Press, 2020), 123.
[5] Silvia Federici, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism (Binghamton: PM Press, 2020), 124.
Image credits
Cover: May 1st demonstration in solidarity to the Sans-Papiers in hunger strike at the Halle Pajol before the occupation of the Saint Bernard Church, 1996, Paris, Photo: Bouba Touré Archive
fig. 1: Dark Garden, Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq, 2021- ongoing. Courtesy of the artist; Hard Graft Gallery Photo: Wellcome Collection/Steven Pocock, 2024
fig. 2: If toxic air is a monument to slavery, how do we take it down?, Forensic Architecture in partnership with RISE St. James, 2021 © Forensic Architecture
fig. 3: Money Makes the World Go Round, Lindsey Mendick, 2023-2024. Commissioned by Wellcome Collection, CC-BY-NC; Hard Graft Gallery Photo: Wellcome Collection/Steven Pocock, 2024
fig. 4: No Rest for the Wicked, Kelly O'Brien, 2004-2022. Courtesy of the artist; Hard Graft Gallery Photo: Wellcome Collection/Steven Pocock, 2024
