Associação Cultural Videobrasil

GABRIELA GOLDER

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1971 Lives in Buenos Aires

The work of Gabriela Golder investigates a series of themes normally associated with memory, social justice, and resistance. Her installations and videos explore the tensions between the individual and the collective, scouring the political history of bodies and the efects of neoliberal economic models. In most of her works, the artist takes her personal experience as her point of departure, highlighting moments that have marked and mobilized her subjectivity in response to the contexts of Argentina and Latin America as a whole. Laboratorio de invención social (o posibles formas de construcción colectiva) [Laboratory for social invention (or possible forms of construction)] is a two-channel video that reflects the concept of “work,” something present in many of Golder’s earlier production. Through interviews with workers from three cooperatives (Cintoplom, Cadenas Ancla, and Cristales San Justo), Golder profers a powerful reflection on the increasingly precarious state of the economy and its outward expressions in job insecurity, bankruptcies, factory sit-ins, and other models of administration. The artist is concerned with documenting the forms of resistance spawned by the widespread layofs afecting the Argentinean worker. Job loss serves here as a platform for speculative imaginings of boss-less factories and other forms of production in the face of contemporary economic vulnerability. In this manner, Golder traces a genealogy of the memory of labor through the collective construction of the common good.

21st Biennial catalog

Transcription of the statement for the 21st Biennial

We are immigrants, workers, refugees, women, victims of state terrorism. I want to listen to learn, to know, to understand. How do we live, survive? What are the strategies? The means? The accounts? The fears? I want to learn the trades, the strengths, the movements. And from there, the next movement is that which leads to possibility of a different and collectively constructed way of thinking and doing.

Laboratorio de Invención Social, my work exhibited the 21st Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, is proposed as space of encounter. Of the workers and myself, initially, but fundamentally of cooperative models, of recovery, of reoccupation with other groups, communities and people.

How is it possible to resist in the face of and within this predatory model? What can we do? What are the tools? What have others done? What have we done?

Yes, the modes of production gathered in the Laboratory propose forms of resistance and struggle. We can all learn from this, to then act. Otherwise we won’t be able to survive.

From these statements emerge survival strategies, creative forms of construction. The workers featured here were not political activists before the factory was recovered, they didn’t know it was possible, they had never heard of the cooperatives.

“Everyone does everything, we all earn the same.” That was one of the first sentences I heard from them. It is indeed a revolutionary proposition at a time when the governments of our countries crush us by implementing policies of repression, hunger and annihilation of rights gained by workers, by minorities.

When I started contacting the workers of recovered factories, when I learned about the cooperatives, their modes of operation, I felt that somehow this had to be useful to other communities, that we must organize ourselves to be stronger and resist.

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