Reproductive labour is understood as the total of unrecognized and often uncompensated work in a capitalist system that, on a daily basis, cares for and maintains others. Reproductive labour or „care work“ is associated with the upbringing of children, the care for elders, for people who are not able to work, self-care, healthcare, housework and sex work. The division between productive and „unproductive work“ goes back to the economist Adam Smith and was criticized by the international feminist movement „Wages for Housework“ in the Seventies that demanded payment for the unwaged domestic work mostly performed by women in the family. In the seminar we investigated „what it means to inscribe social practices which do not produce market commodities into the wage-form, more narrowly, and into the value-form more broadly“ in art practices, as Marina Vishmidt put it. 

In their practical works the students reflect on their private situation and the observations they made in their specific environment in regard to the socio-political context at COVID-19 shut down, keeping in mind Martha Rosler’s „Domination of the Everyday“: (that) „makes clear that we not only have to value that labor as such, but that one way we might be able to do that is to articulate the relations among and between different forms of dailiness: the everyday for her being an ineluctable mixture of politics, culture, and maintenance activities.“ (Helen Molesworth , „House Work and Art Work“, in Art After Conceptual Art, ed. Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann, pp. 93, Cambridge, MA: Generali Foundation and MIT Press, 2006)

Jenni Tischer, Institute for Art and Knowledge Transfer. Seminar: After „Housework and Art Work“