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photos: Emma Spannenberg

 

ride with us: from individual introspection to reflective solidarity

a recap of the artist talk with alina lupu (november 15 ‘24)

by Joshua Miller

Dec 19, 2024

 

 

During the ninth Studium Resort, we spoke to Alina Lupu, a post-conceptual artist investigating precariat economic conditions.

 

After graduating from Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Alina came to realise how unstable her position as an artist was. She picked up side-jobs to fund her practice – having studied fine arts, she found herself a Deliveroo driver. Her realisation was followed by a resolution to better understand precarity by leaning into her condition, and as such her practice is founded on investigating precarious labour conditions through such jobs. In her hands, this is a method of critically investigating the structure of neoliberal capitalism and the conditions it sets for economic participation. Who is allowed in and who faces economy-driven exile?

 

Her research project Minimum Wage Dress Code gave visibility to the marginalisation of artists under neoliberal conditions, to the demands of the latter for side-hustles and constant availability and how herself and her peers are compelled to respond. Her entry point was her own side-job as a Deliveroo driver, a precarious freelance position with no benefits or leave that kept her afloat as an artist at the cost of long-term planning or basic economic security. She devised a series of site-specific interventions designed to subvert role performance expectations, with a view towards collective reflection on precarious conditions. In a message for Philip Padberg, the CEO of Deliveroo, she shone a light on dissonance between the supposed benefits of his freelance approach and the lived reality of workers. Responding to his suggestion that freelance contracts can pay better, for example ten orders in two hours at €5 each, she invited him to become a rider for two hours, deliver ten orders himself and reflect on how it felt. The piece was called #ridewithusphilip.

 

Alina describes herself as in love with institutional critique. The first thing to follow from her research is a better understanding of the structural logic of neoliberalism. The unspoken precarity she found as an artist compelled her to join the acknowledged precariat as a rider. Her embrace of the latter as a research project taught her that both lives were two sides of the same coin. The precarity of artists is less obvious to outsiders. Yet subject to patchy pay, underfunded and lacking stability and negotiating power, they do not escape the precariat. Their practice gives them aspirational glamour and social mobility, but these give them only the appearance of escape.

 

Both groups face competition imperatives that drive them endlessly apart, aggressive individualisation. Neoliberalism by nature applies economic pressure as an engine of mass isolation. The potential collective power of precariat workers becomes invisible as they are forced to focus on their myriad individual positions, struggling not to sink. Alina’s own, seemingly lone, position was an ideal starting point for her investigation, but she never lacked for peers. Entanglement with neoliberal conditions forces countless artists into side-jobs, and so experiential entanglement produces entangled research. Having shone light on a shared struggle, Alina’s conclusion is to call for conscious solidarity among artists, thriving collectively rather than surviving alone.

 

Activism naturally followed. Alina’s approach is holistic, learning from various collectives and standing as both an artist and an organiser with movements for climate justice and solidarity with Palestine. As part of Not Surprised Collective, she was involved in public negotiations with the Stedelijk Museum when the group requested the latter lend them Bakunin’s Barricade (2015-2020) by Ahmet Öǧüt to shield protesters against Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people from Dutch police brutality. She is also involved with XR Justice Now!, an offshoot of XR refusing to compromise on solidarity with Palestine, and is a supporter of the People’s University of Amsterdam.

 

Reciprocal understanding grew between her position and its conditions.

Something ubiquitous and ever-growing faced interrogation through its poisoned fruit.

More like a mycelium than a tree, hiding under the skin of society.

Mycelia connect forests, neoliberalism reduces us to lone trees.

An anti-mycelium.

 

So hold each other tightly and assemble a forest again.

 

–

 

about

Alina Lupu is a Romanian-born, Dutch-based writer and post-conceptual artist. She looks at the role that images and performative actions have when standing in solidarity through protest against capitalist hegemony and precarity. For her, protest has a quite broad definition: from acts of civil disobedience to petitions, debates, and the building of counter-capitalist structures of care, creating a series of dialogues on alternatives to exploitative systems.

Her work has infiltrated De Appel (Amsterdam, NL), Student Encampment for Palestine (Amsterdam, NL), Extinction Rebellion, VHDG (Leeuwarden, NL), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, AU), KABK Student Union (The Hague, NL), NIDA Artists Colony (Nida, LT), l’Alcove (Paris, FR), W139 (Amsterdam, NL), University of the Arts (Bremen, DE), Platform BK (Amsterdam, NL), Radio Alhara (Bethlehem, PS), Buro Stedelijk (Amsterdam, NL).

She’s also a contributing writer to Metropolis M, Critical Meme Reader, The Hmm, Tubelight, Mister Motley, and Simulacrum, and has self-published several collections of essays.

 

Joshua Miller (1998, Dublin), independent cultural journalist and photographer, graduated MA Art History/Curatorial Studies (University of Groningen, 2024)

 

 

studium resort is made possible by Pictoright Fund