Bullshit Job at Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Paris

Grey carpet, cold neon lights, standardised furniture. A faint smell of bland coffee hanging in the air conditioning. Windows cascading on screens. Chained to email loops. Bodies barely moving. Gestures repeated. Repressed desires. You lose track of how long you’ve been here. Welcome to the open plan.

Its aesthetic haunts a whole strand of contemporary creation. From The Office to Severance, from Playtime to Brazil, from catwalks to video clips, office design becomes the set of a collective performance orchestrated by an invisible machinery. It is also a terrain of analysis that fascinates critical thought: David Graeber interrogates the proliferation of meaningless jobs[1]; Byung-Chul Han describes an era consumed by burnout, where individuals become their own oppressors[2]; Silvia Federici situates the invisibilisation of care work within broader mechanisms of exploitation[3]; Federico Campagna reads Work as a God followed by devoted employees[4]; Jonathan Crary shows how capitalism tends to suppress all unproductive time, from sleep to daydreaming[5]. All describe a world in which the organisation of labour infiltrates affects, behaviours, and belief systems.

Visual artists inevitably take up these questions, as the art world is fully implicated in these dynamics. For graduates, “working life” means often moving through a succession of precarious jobs, time-consuming applications, unpaid projects, and nebulous tasks. They learn to navigate a competitive ecosystem where creativity coexists with instability. Between the pressure of visibility, the imperative of profitability, and the internalization of self-employment models, they become both workers and managers of their own survival. The COVID-19 pandemic also brought about a brutal shift: from the studio to the screen, from the collective to the cloud, their practices absorbed the tools and rhythms of the tertiary. Now, in the age of generative AI and the automation of creative tasks, new questions arise: who still creates value? Who is essential, and who merely ticks boxes? Who, ultimately, holds a bullshit job?

The exhibition stages, through its scenography, the simulacrum of a corporate workspace. But this fictitious coworking environment is riddled with cracks, saturated with glitches, haunted by ghosts. It becomes the theatre for numerous acts of resistance aimed at breaking the spell of capitalist and bureaucratic logic. Some works bring back the buried emotions and stifled voices of vanished professions and abandoned factories. Others devise corporate fictions or engage with administrative malfunction. In this unstable landscape, populated by art-eating bugs and nostalgic bots, team-building exercises slip into dystopian tales. Mottos give way to visions of collapse. In places, fantasies of escape pierce the sanitised surface of reality, like glimmers at the end of a tunnel.

The exhibited artists operate in a range of parasitic tactics, squandering techniques, and a bit of magic. Through irony, glitch, care, or dissonance, they sabotage the mechanisms of the dominant order, shaking the promise of progress and neoliberal mirages from within. Their actions carve out lines of flight within a saturated system, sketching out alternative ways of working and being together.  In the wake of Pignarre and Stengers’ intuition, they whisper that “another world is possible.”

–Manon Klein & Andy Rankin

[1] Graeber, David. 2018. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon & Schuster.
[2] Han, Byung-Chul. 2015. The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press.
[3] Federici, Silvia. 2019. Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism. PM Press.
[4] Campagna, Federico. 2013. The Last Night: Anti-Work, Atheism, Adventure. Zero Books.
[5] Crary, Jonathan. 2013. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso.
[6] Pignarre, Philippe, and Isabelle Stengers. 2011. Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. Translated by Andrew Goffey. Palgrave Macmillan.