HUMOUR WORKS,

Bratislava – Sarajevo – Ljubljana – Berlin

While the second half of twentieth century Europe -- the West and the East-block -- was dominated by the work model of ‘secured’ and long-term work relationships, today we face  precarization of work conditions in almost all fields of work. In the last two decades the enlarged Europe has shifted to ‘post-Fordist’ work models, a phenomenon that holds true for the ‘old’ as well as for the ‘new’ Europe. Humour Works researches negative as well as positive aspects of precarious work models in different professions and work environments. In the past, precarious work emerged out of emancipatory needs and was typical for wageworkers, since through mobile wage work, thralls could emancipate themselves from the feudal yoke. In the last twenty years, the model of mobility, flexibility, and personal control over various modes of work is still to be seen as a positive model in terms of emancipatory potential and productivity. Today this model of temporary and project based work is one of the leading work models in general, because it stimulates motivation, creativity, responsibility, and personal attachment to work. However, this model is obviously economically, socially, and politically exploited.

Humour Works is an international curatorial and artistic collaboration focusing on (precarious) work conditions and the resulting social and psychological effects in the context of the enlarged Europe, more closely in Slovakia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Germany. In the project, various discursive and artistic methods – art commissions, theatre and public performances, video screening, talks as well as the present reader – bring to the forefront the current contexts in which precarious work conditions have become dominant. The social and mental map in which artists, theoreticians, curators, and other contributors to the project look for phenomena related to precarious reality is quite broad, as precarization has many faces. Complex geopolitical and economic reasons have led to precarization of our reality as there are also diverse phenomena of precarization in different social systems as well as different forms of reaction to this process. Precarization doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Not only the attempts to regulate the process on the level of union or legal protests – as the new protest against the abolition of a paid lunch break in Slovenia – but also diverse psychological, social, and therefore, also artistic reactions to precarization consitute the conflictual process. The shock, rage, and disbelief about regulations and policies which some years ago seemed absurd and in conflict with common sense have been more and more displaced by mocking, irony, playful ideas, and models of self-sustainability, parallel economies, and activist networking; a whole range of practices which do not assent to the new common sense governed by the cost-minimizing/profit maximizing ideology and empower with laughter.