An artist's book that raises the question of labour and working time.
This artist book,
Deux Ans de Vacances, Dos Años de Vacaciones, Dwa Lata Wakacji, Two Years Vacation, Due Anni di Vacanza, documents the production of Céline Condorelli's process-based, cumulative artwork titled
Tools for Imagination.
The title of the book raises the question of labour and working time, starting from a non-equivalence with its inverse: free time. We can read the various iterations of the title which appear onthe cover as an expression of the impossibility of thinking about time outside of work in a univocal dimension.
If, Céline Condorelli writes, "the struggle for free time has meant very different things in different places. [...] As an idea that navigates through time, changing shape and meaning, until it becomes polluted," it is because in Western society, the preferential relationship between work and free time has long overshadowed a system of direct appropriation of bodies - women's bodies and the bodies of the enslaved - that cannot be reduced to the concept of a workforce.
Tools for Imagination is, in this sense, an attempt to articulate the translation between the artist's working time and the free time of the public in a diagram of complex field struggles, rather than in a search for a transparent correspondence in meaning. This attempt at translation has been articulated through contribution by Jay Bernard, Sergio Bologna, Paolo Caffoni, Valentina Desideri,
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Fanny Gonell Colette Guillaumin, Gilberto Gonzalez, James Langdon, and Maurizio Lazzarato.
