Introduction to the employee manual

C& América Latina: Will this manual also be useful for artists from Central America/Caribbean living in the United States or Europe? Why?

Paula: We believe it is useful because it prompts a series of inquiries into navigating cultural work, thereby equipping individuals with tools and strategies to secure dignified approaches to cultural and artistic endeavours in specific contexts.

Sofía: After all, art economies have long been globalised, and so have systems of value and visibility. Organisations like Beta-Local or TEOR/éTica could not exist in the Caribbean and Central America in the way they currently operate without private funding from American and European institutions. In the publication, we discuss some of the conflicts and opportunities this creates. Simultaneously, one of our fundamental positions regarding cultural work is that it should be anchored in each individual’s context, responding to our material, socio-political realities, etc. This reflection should be present for artists from our region wherever they study or work, serving as a tool of resistance against the colonisation of cultural production imaginaries from the global north.

Nico: On the other hand, asserting that art economies are globalised implies recognising that the artistic field has been shaped by the imaginaries of transnational capital and its logics of fragmentation, mobility, and commodity. This has significantly permeated discourses that subject cultural work – which always encompasses a vast diversity of local interpretations – to a transactional logic focused on the circulation of symbolic and economic capital. This is one of the main focal points of the discussion sustained over nearly five years in which this publication has been developed. These are logics that have mostly been disseminated from the colonial metropolises to the global south.

C&AL: In the context of Central America/Caribbean, how do you envision the future of a sustainable and just cultural life? Is it a matter of reforming institutions or creating more independent organisations? Or are there other actions to consider?

Paula: We should aim for the construction of diverse networks that accommodate both public and private institutions, allowing for the emergence of other independent organisations as well as smaller-scale projects that are often ephemeral. It is crucial to foster greater collaboration and circulation of resources, even establishing mechanisms for dialogue and contribution with more commercial sectors. Rather than simply reforming institutions, we need to organise ourselves to continue defending their existence (where they exist). In some contexts, there is a need to create them, to demand that the State assumes its responsibility to guarantee access to culture and education. It is also a challenge to learn how to engage in dialogue with a diversity of audiences and to attempt to create connections with sectors not specialised in art.

Sofía: It is also important to strengthen spaces for dialogue among cultural workers and resist competition for resources and audiences in order to jointly promote standards of compensation, for example, or to defend public funding for culture.

Nico: It is crucial to hyper-localize practices. To appeal to closer ties with the communities in which projects are situated and to contribute from there to narrate, and to think about ourselves in the particular problems of each space as part of a constant dialogue with cultural workers, but also neighbors and transient populations. In this sense, there are focal points that intersect with everyone and that add to the debate for dignified work: water and agro-food sovereignty, biodiversity, forced displacement, and inequity. This is conceived from a perspective of epistemic justice, reciprocity, and specificity, which challenges the colonial and patriarchal persistence of practices.

Three excerpts from Introduction to the Employee Manual:

Labor Catholicism (1)

Relationship with paid work based on guilt and an excessive inordinate of responsibility (the should-be, the what will people say). A series of fixed ideas established from the structural aspects of our societies to impose models of production, control, and success on us. Everything that prevents us from questioning why we do what we do as we do it and seeking models or ways to free ourselves from these preconceived ideas that subjugate us.

Self-exploitation

One who throws themselves into the individualistic drift of production. Self-employment, in my view, is the opposite of collective work because, unlike the latter, it generates precarious conditions of subsistence that are rooted in an individual logic of non-redistributive accumulation.

Working for an internalised abusive employer.

Emancipation

Emancipation as a dispute for other ways of doing and being in the world. A transitory interruption of a given order. A territorialisation of affects and a form of openness. We will not be emancipated until all are.

Che Melendes says that, in the absence of a concrete infrastructure, cultural workers in Puerto Rico have had to create a symbolic superstructure to sustain themselves (2). That is his version of emancipatory cultural work. Audre Lorde says that “without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and their oppression.” (3) Emancipation is always being negotiated when working in a colony, in a non-profit structure, or in any other system that does not belong to us, and like so many other things, what is negotiated is always insufficient.

An example of this is the gesture of proposing a model of collective management that operates within a foundation whose organisational chart – traditionally – includes the figure of a general manager appointed by a Board of Directors, and “underneath” them the rest of the staff. It is a hierarchy that repeats a logic of power and leads to the invisibilisation of those who make most of the work possible. Although co-management is an experimental model, always under trial, the main objective is to keep alive the exercise of questioning this power and the desire to find other ways of relating to each other and with others.

For further information visit teoretica.org.

About the organisations:

TEOR/éTica
TEOR/éTica is a non-profit foundation dedicated to art and thought, situated in San José, Costa Rica.
www.teoretica.org
@teoretica

Beta-Local
Beta-Local is a non-profit organisation led by cultural workers and established in 2009 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, by the artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, the curator Michy Marxuach, and the artist Tony Cruz.
www.betalocal.org
@beta_local

t-e-e
Economic publishing workshop
The workshop of economic editions is a non-profit publishing house founded in 2010 by Gabriela Castañeda and Nicolás Pradilla in Guadalajara, Mexico.
www.t-e-e.org
@Tallerdeedicioneseconomicas

1 Term by Gilberto González, friend and curator from Tenerife, Canary Islands.

2 Joserramón Melendes is a Puerto Rican writer and editor, founder of queAse publishing house, where he has published countless books by cutting-edge Puerto Rican artists and writers. Interview with Esteban Valdés and Sofía Gallisá Muriente at Burger King in Río Piedras, 2019.

3 Audre Lorde (1934, New York – 1992, St. Croix, Virgin Islands) was an Afro-Caribbean lesbian intellectual and poet seminal in Black feminist thought for her trenchant intersectional analysis. Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, at collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Lorde_The_Masters_Tools.pdf. Translated by us.

Translation: Manyakhalé „Taata“ Diawara