Foto: Wilfred Gachau
A séance with Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt and other workers
The spirit of the artist is promised to be in constant creative transformation and thus a perfect generator of growth. The spirit is a bone, Hegel said. How about insisting on evoking the very concrete, material concerns of artist workers today in order to understand common conditions of productive spirits in late capitalism? On invitation by Kunsthall Trondheim, the spirits of artists, thinkers, students and other workers, who contributed to the performance festival WORKS AT WORK in Copenhagen 2014-16, are invoked to reveal their care and concerns. In a séance the artistic director of the festival, Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt, will speak through their names and voices to spread light and darkness on conditions of artistic labour in solo, duo and group work: the hopes, rebellions and strategies as well as the “precarisation”, exploitation and exhaustion. The backbones of these spirits will include the loneliness of the mobile solo worker, the tiresome antagonism of duo workers and the longing for structurally assured collaboration of group workers.
Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt is working as a researcher, curator and performance artist. From 2011 to 2015 she was artistic research associate teaching at the BA “Dance, Context, Choreography” at Inter-University of Dance in Berlin. Currently she is writing her Ph.D. in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her doctoral research focuses on which understanding of work is trained during artistic education. Schmidt has curated the international performance festival WORKS AT WORK in Copenhagen 2014-2016 together with dramaturge Ida-Elisabeth Larsen.