Date: Monday December 8th
Time: 8pm
Admission: $5 Suggested Donation
Location: Morbid Anatomy Museum, 424 Third Avenue, Brooklyn 11216
This event is presented by Amy Herzog, Programmer in Residence
Common Cinema Laboratories is a series of events that will bring together and collectivize cinematic exhibition, analysis, and image making. Ultimately, Common Cinema Laboratories seeks to develop forms of life from the projection of films and the installation of various other kinds of simulations. This means working collectively on and with all kinds of images from graffiti to immersive gaming to sound installation and music, in order to see whether such work can participate in the creation of communist measures: actions capable of producing new communal capacities, and capable of working towards irreversible break with our current situation. In order for Common Cinema Laboratory to work, participants must bring clips and stills to the sessions.
When we used to watch movies together in public, we were trying to find each other: the random passions of chance encounters in Times Square porn theaters, Eisenstein’s collectivized spectators as subject of history, the vanguard cinephile cliques solicited by the new waves. A series of screenings from the premier of Entr’acte (Clair, 1924) to the premier of Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Debord, 1952) showed that every audience is an insurrection waiting to be provoked into experimental behavior. The revolutionary potential of people together in spaces that could be made truly public called to us from behind 20th century cinema’s spectacular apparatus. Currently we consume cinema largely in isolation, alone or in a couple, often wearing earphones, cut off from even the minimal new collective established when a group brought together by chance reacts to something together. The Internet has brought a huge film archive with unprecedented availability, movie blogs, review aggregators, exchanges in the user comment fields of various kinds commercial sites, and has turned the video essay into a new public form of Cinema Studies; but these new possibilities each make it less necessary for bodies to congregate. Common Cinema Laboratories continues our abandoned attempt to construct forms of life with screenings addressing the questions of our time — projections in rooms where we will gather and look for one another by presenting and analyzing simulations collectively.
The Second CCL event will take place at The Morbid Anatomy Museum. We will look at Images of caring labor images of caring Labor: the paid or unpaid work of mothers, fathers, family, airline attendants, nurses and doctors, psychologists, waiters, baristas, sex workers, even of each of us when we do the work of caring for ourselves so that we can go keep returning to our jobs or stay ready to be hired. The purpose of caring labor is generally to reproduce potential labor power. Being a parent means preparing one’s child to enter the waged work force. Capital could not function if all caring labor were waged, so like parenting, much of it is unwaged. Capitalism disguises caring labor as personal life much of the time, confining it to the private sphere. Since it’s both a diffuse and ideologically disguised category, it falls on us to show each other what caring labor looks like. Perhaps one way to do that is the cinema.
As the service sector has grown in the former capitalist core (The US and Northern Atlantic Europe) caring labor has become ubiquitous. Not only are healthcare and education massive employment sectors, most service sector jobs involve a component of caring: servers, call center workers, cuddle center entrepreneurs, even working at Whole Foods all involve modulating one’s affect to give the customer the feeling of being cared for. Meanwhile, as women entered the waged work force, as single parenting increased along with same sex parenting, more and more of the unwaged caring labor of social reproduction has been colonized by the market. From disposable diapers, to the daycare boom, to the delivery of prepared meals, the care people extracted from one another is now for sale. Currently, we are experiencing a crisis of social reproduction because most people have neither time to provide caring labor nor the means to buy it. The New York session of CCL will ask whether by trying to perceive caring labor in images we can create a revolutionary concept of caring labor. When revolutionary situations develop people at a certain point become willing to suspend at least a certain amount of caring labor in order to stop reproducing the social arrangements against which they have decided to fight. Many of those who do caring labor professionally, especially those who organize caring labor in vulnerable communities are committed to solving the immediate problems of how to deliver care to those who may die without it. While those goals are to be supported, CCL wants to ask how we could think about caring labor in a way that would destroy the system that makes caring a form of labor rather than solving the problems of those who need care.
Bring images (JPegs, AVIs, Quicktimes etc) of people doing caring labor, either in waged market place or in the wage mediated private and philanthropic sphere. Bring images of structures that make enforce the equivalence between caring and labor. Bring images of cases in which caring appears as a different kind of social relation, unrelated to the wage.
The event will have two halves:
I
A multimedia lecture/Q&A devoted to the exposition of a method loosely based on Jean Luc Godard’s technique in HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA (1998), and an exposition of how cinema developed as a praxis of making social reproduction visible and caring labor analyzable.
II
We will screen materials from the participants, prepared to be shown in comparable pairings. (side-by-side, superimposed, or otherwise organized so that multiple images can be seen together and discussed at the same time as we look at and listen to them.) Participants in the laboratory should prepare multiple exhibits in common formats such as JPEG, QuickTime, and AVI files. The exhibits should relate to surplus value. Participants should also prepare lines of inquiry, comparison, and contextualization. In order to focus our work participants should prepare exhibits for the laboratory that allow us to rethink our own participation in the forms of exploitation. Contact Louis-Georges Schwartz ([email protected]) about AV technology concerns, strategizing interventions, giving examples of the exhibition techniques, and anything else that might be helpful in advance of the event.
Read Nancy Folbre on caring labor here
http://www.republicart.net/
Read Maya Andrea Gonzalez on gender and social Reproduction here
http://endnotes.org.uk/en/
Read Selman James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa on withholding caring labor here
https://libcom.org/…/power-
Read Tiqqun on caring labor and the human strike here.
http://caringlabor.wordpress.
Read descriptions of caring labor at The Poetic Labor Project.
http://labday2010.blogspot.com
