Documentations

Documentations is a collaborative media initiated in 2018 in France. Our aim is to fight against the conservative and hegemonic discourse that governs art today.

We were commissioned to take part in a panel discussion, which has been cancelled in the context of Covid-19 and was replaced by a recorded Jitsi conversation with Matthew D. Rana.

For this essay, we decided to focus on the following questions: how can art writing and art criticism be used to improve the labor conditions of cultural workers? How do we build tools to enable difficult conversations about unaddressed wealth and power gaps in this field? Why are dissent and confrontation essential to these conversations?

Documentations is a collaborative media initiated in 2018 in France. Our aim is to fight against the conservative and hegemonic discourse that governs art today. Our editorial board and most of our contributors remain anonymous. Our publications include investigative articles, opinion pieces, essays, interviews, and exhibition reviews. We also document the ongoing struggles and political actions of art workers in France and abroad, mostly through social media.

We were commissioned to take part in a panel discussion which was cancelled in the context of Covid-19 and replaced by a recorded Jitsi conversation with Matthew D. Rana. We were also commissioned to write an essay on the matters of care and working conditions in the context of art writing. We were offered SEK 6000 (approx. EUR 600) for the essay and SEK 6000 for the panel.

For this essay, we decided to focus on the following questions: how can art writing and art criticism be used to improve the labor conditions of cultural workers? How do we build tools to enable difficult conversations about unaddressed wealth and power gaps in this field? Why are dissent and confrontation essential to these conversations?