RADIUS is delighted to present BECOMING UNCOMMON SUBJECTS, an exhibition project by Werker Collective. Structured in three intersecting works for each of the three circles that shape the exhibition space of RADIUS, this exhibition displays three of the main methodologies in Werker’s practice: moving image, textile, and archive. Werker Collective operates at the intersection of labour, ecofeminism, and LGBTQIA+ movements, developing projects alongside a network of collaborators that forge intergenerational and intersectional solidarity and create alliances where to study, imagine, perform, and make art together. Founded by Marc Roig Blesa and Rogier Delfos in Amsterdam in 2009, Werker has been building an archive of manifold printed matter and moving image, comprising more than three thousand documents at present. In every project they undertake, the archive is activated via different methodologies and by different constellations of collaborators.

At its core, this exhibition zooms in on the topic of abolition as a framework to reconsider systems of labour under Capitalism. What could the abolition of labour look and feel like? How can we use its premises, tools, and tactics to imagine and enact other kinds of work that are not based on exploitation, competition, or indenture? By exploring the abolition of labour, this exhibition opens possibilities of reclaiming and redefining work, moving from labour as a method of repression and extraction to the constitution of spaces of solidarity and collective action that form the “Uncommons”, a proposal by author McKenzie Wark.

Amidst the aggravation and shameless exaltation of heteropatriarchal, populist, and nationalist ideologies, the urgency to enable spaces to challenge the status quo by means of queer, transfeminist, antiracist, and ecological perspectives is now more acute than ever. This exhibition departs from “uncommonality” as a shared condition and taps into its potential for resistance and self-determination. Through knowledge exchange, worker’s solidarity, and collaborative artistic practices, Werker Collective advocates for the abolition of oppressive systems and imagines their replacement.

Author McKenzie Wark defines the “Uncommons” as an expansion of the meaning of “Commons”—a space for collective ownership and shared resources. Wark argues that in the Uncommons, workers could get together not only to care for, create, and distribute shared goods and resources, but also to build a queer space and timeframe to challenge the dominant structures of capitalism, heteronormativity, and commodified cultural production. The Uncommons also accounts for what political philosopher Antonio Negri defined as “immaterial labour”: a self-organised labour producing social and common relations rather than the material commodities produced by capitalist labour. Thus, becoming uncommon subjects could be defined as a quest toward the reclamation and reconstitution of relationships and social structures by means of shared practices of care, resistance, and creativity.  

In the Uncommons, we get to resignify ourselves. As philosopher Paul B. Preciado reminds us, the only way to step out of fascist, hegemonic systems of oppression is to flip the categories used to other us so that we can ultimately subvert or get rid of them. In other words, by becoming uncommon we get to displace and give new meaning to notions that have gendered, pathologised, commodified, and racialised human and nonhuman bodies alike in order to extract economic value out of both waged and free labour, progressively widening the divide between classes and reinforcing binary epistemologies: left or right, hetero or queer, legal or illegal, white or otherwise, natural or unnatural. Becoming uncommon is to endeavour towards living better lives, which can only be fully realised when labour, understood as the subjugation of all life for the enrichment of an elitist few, is abolished. 

Abolition as contemporary political theory emerged in the 1970s in the United States as a philosophical and activistic movement against the prison system. Prison abolitionism can be traced back from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, and the abolitionism movement is rooted in anti-slavery struggles across the world. However, in the last decades abolitionism has pluralised its demands beyond the abolition of the carceral system as a regime of punishment, free labour, and racism. Authors like Ruth Wilson Gilmore argue that abolition is not just a call to dismantle prisons: it is also an expansive framework for understanding and undoing the social, economic, and spatial relations that reproduce oppression among marginalised individuals and communities. It is within this framing that this exhibition explores the potential of abolition as a tool for the phaseout of systems of oppression. Calling for the abolition of labour is to open possibilities to reclaim and redefine work, moving from labour as a method of repression and exploitative extraction to the constitution of spaces of solidarity and collective action.

The Uncommons is a framework where freedom is exercised with others. It does not presume or produce a collective identity under the rubric of identity politics—a non-ecological means of political alliance-making, based on exclusivity and essentialism that fails to furnish a broader conception of what it means to live together across difference, however difficult. Instead, the Uncommons enables dynamic relations of support, dispute, breakage, joy, and solidarity. Here, Judith Butler stresses that only as subjects—regardless of species—who recognise the conditions of ecological interdependency can any of us struggle for the realisation of any political goal during times in which the very social conditions of existence have come under economic and political assault.

The Uncommons is a bodily demand for a more liveable set of lives. It is a demand that asks for a re-eroticisation of our bodies away from the commodifying gaze of Capitalism and unleashed from the biopolitical control of sexual reproduction as just a means to supply Capitalism with labour power. The Uncommons beckons an eroticism best described by Audre Lorde: the erotic not only being a question of what we do with our bodies, but a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Lorde states that “for once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy we know ourselves to be capable of”. It is precisely this capability of joy that is so important to reclaim in the Uncommons, as “the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.”

Gradually we come to realise that the uncommon subject is unmistakably a queer subject. Not only in a literal sense, given that being uncommon is a trait made implicit to queer people, but also because it expresses the potentiality of bodies to remove themselves from the capitalist, patriarchal, and colonial genealogy of modernity by means of strategies of inadequacy, dissidence, and unidentification. Queerness, in its potential to reject identity as a condition for capital’s legibility, is able to upset power structures and reveal the intersectionality between struggles. To oppose Capitalism is to refuse to work under its subjugation. To oppose the construct of gender is to oppose class, as it influences and shapes gender roles and experiences based on factors like income, education, and occupation. To oppose class is to oppose labour, given that the economic value of work is based on the asymmetrical access to the means of production and information, which are captured by the richest at the expense of the poorest. And to oppose labour is to oppose ecological devastation, which is characteristic of a system that keeps demanding free work and resources from nonhuman animals and ecosystems. 

The uncommon subject, thriving in dissidence, joyful in resistance, aware of ecological interdependency, pushes through outmoded relations and forms of living. In this exhibition, we open a space and time where we can become uncommon by discussing processes of political agency; by carrying out supportive cultural production; by reflecting on how we consume and reproduce; by establishing interrelations out of distinctiveness; by finding more satisfying ways of self-representation; by exploring how we wish to desire and love. The task at hand is tremendous, but we are not starting from scratch. The Uncommons has been long rumbling in every queer, transfeminist, antiracist, union, crip, and ecological movement. Across differences, we fight for uncommon paradigms to replace the “normal” principles of Capitalism. In our banners we paraphrase McKenzie Wark’s call: “Workings of the world untie! You have a win to world!”

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