El trabajo es la Dictadura

This title of the LiberArs series, by conceptual Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, is the materialisation of a performance proposed by the author which consists in making 30 workers, hired for the minimum wage recommended by the National Employment Service., to fill out one thousand copies of a blank notebook, repeating the phrase ‘work is a dictatorship’ over and over again.

This action is coherent with the whole artistic production of Santiago Sierra, who in the last decade has carried out a great number of politically critical performances where participants are, in some way, victims of the very situation that is denounced. Thus in 2012 he made war veterans from different conflicts— Afghanistan, Colombia, Vietnam, Iraq, Northern Ireland—stand for hours facing the wall as part of several performances held in Nuremberg, Germany; Adelaide, Australia; Manchester, UK; and Bogota, Colombia, among other cities. In the same vein, in 2010 Sierra hired a group of workers who were to stay inside closed boxes in the Castello de Roccolo, in Busca, Italy. That year he also completely buried ten workers in the sand beach of Calambrone, Italy.