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THE SPECULATIVE
COLLECTIVITY OF THE
GLOBAL TRANSNATIONAL, OR,
SOCIAL PRACTICE AND THE
INTERNATIONAL DIVISION OF
LABOUR
Verónica Tello

Aesthetic autonomy at the border

In New York, Tania Bruguera initiates the Immigrant Movement International (2012–), a community space
for, by, and with undocumented migrants which operates workshops (on rights, health, and art, for
example) in Queens, New York.
In London, Ahmet Ögüt initiates The Silent University (2012–), an experimental education platform
to activate the knowledge of migrants who have not had, or are unable to have, their academic qualifica-
tions recognised in the countries in which they reside.
In Athens, Rick Lowe sets up the Victoria Square Project (2017–2018), a short-term community space
hosting dialogues and skill-based workshops for/by refugees and migrants in collaboration with dozens
of Greek NGOs and small businesses as part of documenta 14.
In the Central Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale, Olafur Eliasson organises an iteration of his
workshop series Green Light (2016–) through which asylum seekers and refugees collaborate on con-
structing lamps made from recycled materials; the lamps are sold for a minimum of € 250, the proceeds
of which support NGOs that work with refugees.
These four projects offer a glimpse into the ways in which contemporary art practice has unfolded
within the context of draconian border policies affected by and affecting growing xenophobia towards
migrants – the undocumented, the undeportable, asylum seekers and refugees – since the mid to late
1990s.They broadly speak to the collaborative impulse driving much contemporary art, especially social
practice, in its attempts to dissolve boundaries between us/them, artist/community and contest the
subjugation of migrants to the often-unlawful rule of nation-states and intergovernmental bodies such
as the EU.1 Such works embody, or at the very least critically gesture toward, the radical capacities of art
in the face of necropolitical ‘deathworlds’ (Mbembe 2003).1
Questions such as, ‘what is to be done?’ emerge within contemporary art discourse as nation-states
fail to uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or existing infrastructures struggle to support

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refugees. In turn, ideas and gestures of solidarity arise, contingent on the potentiality of the social role
that contemporary art might play in such a context. As Eliasson states:

In 2015, I was in Vienna working on an exhibition just as forced migration increased in

Europe. It was clear at that moment that the EU was not going to come up with an adequate
response, actually the EU was if anything falling apart, [. . .] the despair and the sense of trag-
edy, [. . .] it was hard to find out what to do. At the time, as I was in Vienna, I collaborated
with TBA21 to find a strategy from within (breathing the air of the cultural centre) that we could
apply [to the situation].This is how the Green Light project started, [on the premise that] there
must be tools, strategies, ways in which we [in the arts] could come together, and come up
with a solution.
(2017, my italics)

Eliasson’s comments are not, at least on surface level, very different to those of multiple other artists
and curators, who in working collaboratively with migrants and art institutions argue that art might
offer a form of resistance to the imposition of necropolitics and bare life in Europe and other Western
countries from ‘within’. Beyond the aforementioned projects, recent examples include Maria Hlavajova’s
collaborations with the We Are Here refugee collective at BAK, and Creative Time’s On Homelands and
The Stateless as the World Tilts Right (2017).
I want to posit that within the current political context, such art’s value, which is to say why it
generates resources and finance from art institutions or funding bodies, is its operative and perceived
autonomy. That is, its capacity to offer a space of critical distance from heteronomous forces (govern-
ments, the EU) and generate an aesthetic experience distinct from, yet in critical dialogue with, border
violence.

*
Historically, aesthetic autonomy has assumed the artist’s distance from external social, economic and
political forces and, in turn, the artist’s capacity for self-determination. The etymology of autonomy
reveals this – autos signifies ‘self ’ and nomos means ‘law’; autonomy is thus the act of determining your
own law for yourself. For Brian Holmes, following Hegel, this level of self-determination is always
mediated by the social; humans only exist as an ‘I’ in relation to others – ‘they’, ‘us’, ‘we’ – and shared
languages and cultures (2004). Yet, while this rings true, aesthetic autonomy has always been based on
undeniable individualism. It assumes that the products of the artist’s labour are unbound from other,
more common, namely capitalist, modes of production and the production of the proletariat – however
on their side the avant-garde may have been (Grindon 2011).
We could say that Eliasson’s Green Light project, for example, is founded on a fairly normative
assumption of the politics of aesthetic autonomy. Collaborators, or migrant workers, labour to produce
objects which gain their exchange-value, and symbolic-value, through the artist’s name, reflecting and
instituting a division of labour which ensures that the intellectual labour of the artist is inalienable from
the object, even if the object is the labour of others. If autonomy is based on a division of labour –
between the distinct labour of the artist and other kinds of labour – then what kind of solidarity with
those subjected to gendered and racialised bio and necro-politically managed life is possible within and
through art?

I, you, we, together

It is not so farfetched to claim that contemporary art, especially social practice, is attuned to the spirit of
collectivity. As critics Peter Osborne (2011) and Terry Smith (2015) argue, contemporaneity is guided by
an ethos of ‘being together in time’ across uneven social spaces – reflective of the effects of globalisation,
digital networks and the spectres of communism post-1989. Artists are attempting to forge new ways of
living to engage with the potentiality of building new futures that might erode narratives of ‘apocalypse’,

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‘no alternative’, and the ‘end of history’ (take your pick), which have dominated understandings of time
and potentiality in the past three decades.
And so artists initiate projects to make concrete new possibilities of what our present and future
might be through collaborative social practice, These projects appear to be exemplary models for an
idea of forging collectivity in contemporaneity, shaped by globalisation and border politics. Yet, by
looking at Ögüt’s The Silent University, I want to posit that, while more complex than Eliasson’s Green
Light, such projects tend to function through similar modes of autonomy which rely on a division of
labour – between the mythologised, distinctive figure of the artist and the masses (participants, migrant
communities), effectively foregoing a convincing model of collectivity.

The Silent University

As an experimental education platform, the Silent University appoints migrants as faculty members who
are tasked with developing the curriculum via lectures. Lectures are based on faculty expertise or per-
sonal migratory experience, spanning topics such as democracy, human trafficking, computer science,
Persian music, and experimental film. After five years in operation, the University has campuses in many
European cities, including London, Stockholm, Hamburg, Mülheim, and Athens. Most recently it has
been established in the Middle East, in the Jordanian city of Amman. While receiving support from
various art institutions such as the Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm) or the Ringlokschuppen (Mülheim),
primarily in the form of real estate/space, the university mostly operates through volunteer labour. As
the Silent University website states: ‘alternative currencies’ in the form of ‘free voluntary service’ allow
the University to operate outside of capitalist markets. Engaging with the University’s discourse on col-
laboration, and time and skills sharing, critics, such as Pelin Tan (2014) and Neylen Bağcıoğlu (2016),
consistently argue that it engages with the radical ‘politics of commoning’ (Tan 2014). However, while
the University offers a compelling representation of collaboration, I suggest that it is sustained by the
uneven social relations of global capital and contemporary global art which in its current market form
prioritises the individual artist/author.
For example, following the patterns of humanitarian volunteerism, and unpaid work, in the Silent
University the affective labour of coordinating – of organising lectures, forming support networks with
and for the faculty, running social media for events, hiring venues – is performed by mostly white Euro-
pean women: students, activists, and curators without or with little pay, and social workers doing extra
time. They are unacknowledged – largely invisible in the University’s communication or other discourse.
If they appear, it is on the margins, much like the women in Daniela Ortiz’s 97 empleadas domésticas (97
House Maids) of 2016. The work comprised photos the artist found on Facebook posted by wealthy
Peruvian families. In the images, housemaids appear in the background, margins, peripheries. While
there are clearly distinctions between the housemaids and the coordinators, nonetheless they represent
what feminist Marxist theorists have termed ‘service or administrator as infrastructure’ – commonly
perceived as un-skilled, devalued labour that art institutions or domestic spaces rely upon (Francke and
Jardine 2017). Coordinators are highly aware of the gendered division of labour within the Silent Uni-
versity. As one coordinator observed in conversation with the author: ‘The artist performs the artist, the
refugee performs the refugee, the coordinator the coordinator. The question is, can we transcend these
normative roles and put them into question as well?’ In an act of what Claire Bishop (2012) has termed,
‘delegated performance’, migrants are paid to perform themselves within the artwork. Their presence
offers the work a level of authenticity – and symbolic capital – that is otherwise unavailable through the
body of the artist or coordinators. Images of the faculty labouring/standing in front of a lectern with
the University logo, or a PowerPoint projection, are heavily circulated. The function of such images is to
evidence that the University is performing its task of circumventing the racialised, international division
of labour that mutes the knowledge of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees once they cross the border.
Yet, at almost every mention of the University, it is the artist’s name that is uttered on promotional mate-
rial, in art publications, or lectures and public programs as a means to constantly contain it within the
borders of the artist, author, or ‘initiator’.

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Politics of authorship
Perhaps anticipating the limitations of Eliasson’s Green Light, projects such as the Silent University,
Immigrant Movements International, and Victoria Square Project consistently attempt to critique the idea
of authorship (and its ties to concepts of ownership) by deploying the term ‘initiator’ instead (see,
for example, Bruguera and Kershaw 2016). The term is meant to imply that while such projects may
be conceptualised by an artist, they are designed to be maintained, and run by the migrant collec-
tives and/or communities for which such institutions/projects were initiated in the first place (other
projects include the Silent University, 2012-, discussed later). Following André Lepecki we might think
of ‘initiation’ as an attempt to energise, to set in motion, movements that elicit social ruptures – it
could be a ‘verb-event’ (2013: 32) which opens up space for responsive, dynamic movement between
different subjects, rejecting both tokenistic participation and ‘authoritative authorship’ (ibid.: 34) for
the purposes of forming political assemblages and structures. Yet, while promoted as an adhocratic
movement, the University operates via a hierarchal structure which designates fixed roles/tasks/jobs
for the ‘artist’/Ögüt, ‘faculty’/migrants, and, last but not least, the ‘coordinators’/female volunteers
who perform the bulk of the administrative and affective labour to maintain the University. In spite of
a rhetoric of ‘initiation’, the structure of the University preserves the figure of the author, positioning
this subject on the ‘exploiters’ side of the international division of labour, to quote Gayatri Spivak
(1988), in turn simultaneously preserving the Western subject in the name of building ‘platforms for
the subaltern to speak’.

Speculative collectivity
One could argue that in contemporary art, in spite of ‘collaborative’ social practice, collectivity – as
opposed to authoritative authorship – is speculative, or futural; it remains on the horizon as some-
thing to aspire to. Indeed, as Osborne argues, contemporary art is a privileged catalyst for exploring
the ‘geopolitically diverse forms of social experience that have only recently begun to be represented
within the parameters of the common world’ (2011: 115). Further, as a practice, labour and as a form
of capital, contemporary art ‘projects the utopian horizon of global social interconnectedness, in the
ultimately dystopian form of the market’ (ibid.). This means that it is simultaneously animating the spirit
of ‘contemporaneity’ – the co-presence and conviviality of the disjunctive unity subjects – and working
through the global art system which privileges subjects of the global North (it advances a dystopian
market form which stubbornly holds onto the modern regime of authorship as opposed to the collec-
tivity of contemporaneity). The question thus remains, how can art convincingly articulate or institute
a space reflective of the speculative collectivity of contemporaneity, constituted by disjunctive social
relations rather remain within the aesthetic regime of modernity?
It may be less a matter of ‘initiating’ projects which pursue normative concepts of autonomy and
which all the while offering an image, a rhetorical gesture to collectivity/collaboration, and more a
matter of creating a space through which both the ‘author-function’ is rigorously deconstructed and the
interdependencies (rather than division) of labours are embraced as core to the advancement of collectivity
(even if it is never constituted by equivalent subjects). This is not permitted by maintaining and valu-
ing art practices that adhere to normative concepts of autonomy, and which extract labour from the
reserve army of refugees, and the reproductive and unwaged labour of precarious subjects. Autonomy
must instead seek to register and critically engage with its relation to capital – including its relations to
‘solidarity’ as a commodity niche – and forge a path that maintains the radical aspects and potentiality
of art as a site of resistance, while refusing to insist on the avant-gardist notion of the hero/author, the
‘I’. Autonomy, as the feminist materialist theorists Marina Vishmidt and Kerstin Stakemeier argue, ‘can
only be achieved with the destruction of the system that denies autonomy to everyone who lives in it’
(2016: 65).

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Note
1 Deathworlds are liminal zones where life becomes the life of the ‘living dead’, subjected to both the nation-
state’s penal border policies (in the name of the sovereignty) and the ‘management’ of life through global capital
and corporations who operate camps (such as Broadspectrum, formerly Transfield, which ran Australia’s offshore
detention centres for a $1.2 billion contract).

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