(in)visible labor / (in)visible structures

In the shadows of large-scale industrial production, a hidden workforce keeps a vast system running – its presence felt only through the garments we wear, the houses we buy, the platforms we scroll, and the food we consume. The price of these services and products, set within an unregulated market, is seemingly low. But what is the true cost in the form of time, energy, and health invested by those working at the margins?

Work and its worth are not primarily visible or invisible. Work’s visibility is rather a spectrum influenced by powerful economic and social forces. Extractive economies run on an active form of rendering workers as well as nonhuman labor invisible – through the power to decide not to see, acknowledge, or value often physically intensive work. Care work mostly carried out by women, migrant workers’ construction work, and the metabolic work of livestock¹ lie in the shadows of what the state and the legal system deems formal work, and thus of who is granted working rights.

In addition, lacunae in the perception of the society at large are actively facilitated by confining and limiting access to visible spaces for working individuals. Those who are employed to moderate online content do their tagging from home. And those who build houses for others often create temporary homes in the sites they work in, without access to a voice in the public sphere. Slaughterhouses and large-scale farms where broiler chickens labor by growing at twice their usual rate are highly securitized and segregated sites where no sights, sounds, and smells are allowed to spill out (Ramos 2023).² And while various forms of labor remain invisible to the public eye, those in power simultaneously observe nonhuman and human working bodies at all times, these workers not having equal rights to look back.³

While (in)visibility is not only related to seeing or to a visual act, in a state of dependence, it can be a tool of power. The act of putting people on display can be harmful to them in certain situations.⁴ With no work or residency permit in a given country, those who need to work under the radar are at risk of losing everything if they are caught by those in power. Simultaneously, the margins can be strong spaces of solidarity, community, and soft networks.

Therefore, the question is not merely how to make invisible labor visible. Rather we must ask: How can we recognize the spaces at the fringes of formal work? How can invisibilized labor be honored and safer working conditions attained without assimilating the work itself? And how can we show solidarity beyond the binary of visibility and invisibility?

Living with Building – An urban (hi)Story
HD video | 2’16″
Rojia Forouhar Abadeh

The ongoing research project came about from Rojia Forouhar’s experience and insight as a trained architect. Over time, she observed an often-overlooked phenomenon in Iran within urban development – an architectural blind spot that creates an unrecognized visibility barrier, isolating the Afghan construction workers from the city of Tehran that they are drastically, rapidly, and continuously building.

These workers, many of whom lack legal status, endure precarious living and working conditions, residing on-site in the very buildings they construct. Their lives become hidden within the city’s structural frameworks, in temporary spaces they inhabit before moving to the next site.

Initiated in 2022, this project documents the lived experiences of these invisible laborers through extensive fieldwork across ten construction sites in Tehran and its immediate suburbs. Through photography, interviews, and everyday objects, the project captures their unique yet transient connections to the spaces they build, highlighting how they shape the urban landscape in ways that typically remain unseen and unacknowledged.

The project examines this lack of visibility within urban narratives. By shedding light on the everyday lives of these laborers, Living with Building offers an alternative history of Tehran’s rapid urbanization – one that foregrounds the sociopolitical and spatial dynamics enabling the city’s growth.

Invisible Bodies – Intimate Labor (2009–2014)
Image Slideshow | 04’49“
Virginia Lupu

The photo series Invisible Bodies – Intimate Labor shows cisgender and transgender women from the sex work community in Romania. Sex work is invisibilized on many levels as it is pushed to the margins of society. Persistent stigma and guilt continue to treat sex work as a taboo while laws and regulations have tried (and continue to try) to forbid sex work. Furthermore, the fight to have it recognized as legitimate labor often goes unnoticed. Looking at both the history and the current public discourse, it’s apparent that one-sided perspectives are patronized, rather than including persons with an expertise through lived experience.

Between 2009 and 2014, Virginia Lupu connected with the sex work community while she was working as a sex worker herself. Lupu documented their working space, joys and dramas they shared, and parties they celebrated. They also supported each other through difficult times, with lasting friendships emerging from these bonds. The series includes photos of sex workers who work on the street (some of the most vulnerable and precarious groups), as well as an older generation of Romanian sex workers who worked during the Communist era (many of whom have sadly passed away).

All That is Solid (2014)
HD video | 15’40“
Louis Henderson

As technological progress pushes forward in the West, enormous piles of obsolete computers are thrown away and recycled. Pushed out of sight and sent to the coast of West Africa, these computers end up in waste grounds such as Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana. On arrival the e-waste is recuperated by young men, who break and burn the plastic casings to extract the precious metals within. Eventually the metals are sold, melted, and reformed into new objects to be sold – it is a strange system of recycling, a kind of reverse neocolonial mining, whereby the African is searching for mineral resources in the materials of Europe. Through showing these heavy processes, the video highlights the importance of dispelling the capitalist myth of the immateriality of new technology to reveal the mineral weight with which the Cloud is grounded to its earthly origins.

Generation (2021–2023)
Multimedia installation
Daniel Szalai

What will the cow of the future look like if its evolution is entirely controlled by algorithms and managed according to a selection principle that prioritizes the cow’s compatibility with the technological infrastructure and its efficiency in serving economic goals? The project Generation reflects on this issue and raises questions about our relationship with nature and technology. Taking a speculative stance, it projects different evolutionary trajectories of cows using GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) trained on images of Holstein cows obtained from cattle catalogues.

The resulting images oscillate between idealistic images, science-fiction visions and mystical fantasies. The constantly evolving visuals are presented on a holographic LED fan; a device that not only refers to disembodiment and virtualization, but also evokes the giant air conditioning fans on dairy farms and the rise in global temperatures. At the same time, it creates a monotonous, mechanical soundscape for the work.

Generation is part of Daniel Szalai’s long-term artistic research, into humanity’s relationship with nature and technology. The body of work investigates various technologies used by advanced capitalism to exploit the generative functions of non-human, mostly female animals.

(in)visible structures

Invisible structures that build the base for a project include compiling research, exchanging ideas, and sometimes unplanned, deep conversations. Akademie Schloss Solitude is a space where many of these meaningful discussions happen. These might be invisible to the outside or sometimes only bear fruit at a later date, but a structure for collaboration and community emerges.

While the focus in this exhibit lies on the conversations that revolved around the topic of invisible labor and working conditions, further topics included acts of seeing; truth in times of AI images; perceptions of time during war and crises; the public role of artists, writers, activists; archiving practices and memory; secrets; as well as access and relations to our surroundings (natural, physical, digital, spiritual).

A very concrete structure that accompanied the Schloss community was the scaffolding. Merve Bedir describes it beautifully in her e-flux article »Scaffolding the Commons«:

»Scaffolding is an instrument of collective labor that facilitates communication among workers to distribute and conduct work. (…) As a temporary structure, scaffolding enables the care and maintenance work on a building, but, spatially, it helps shape the movement of people or ideas. Scaffolding is a material system that can therefore be used to refuse seemingly solid realities or imaginations and allow for new imaginaries to be born.«⁵ 

While it was built up to facilitate renovation works on the Akademie building, the scaffolding became a part of new practices and everyday conversations. During winter, fellows hung coconuts with seeds for the birds. Upon arrival someone handed you the first coconut as a present. A new tradition came into being that included daily encounters with other inhabitants like the woodpeckers and sparrows. New stories and relationships were born. With the new generation of fellows arriving, the scaffolding becomes a structure for the transfer of knowledge, conversations, and experiences from one generation to the next.

Conversation Library

The conversation library was based on the discussions of past and current Akademie fellows in 2024 and shared works and other materials relevant to the exchange. The conversation library, among other text and projects, included a sound recording by Arsita Iswardhani, a video work by Marco Pando, and documentation of Mateusz Kowalczyk’s VR work.

In the recording Small Surroundings and Our Daily Life Choreography by former fellow Arsita Iswardhani’s »farewell ritual« performance in June 2024, listeners are invited to re-listen, revisit and rethink our daily choreography. Marco Pando performs a day’s labor by holding a carnation (Rote Nelke) for a period of eight hours as a manifestation of solidarity and remembrance in the video performance 8 hours of work. In Living Labour Mechanisms, Mateusz Kowalczyk invites participants to walk through a rescaled Petri dish, inside which they can play with the scale of DNA strains to understand one of the elements of the scientific process of the mysterious field of molecular science.

Many thanks for the contributors to the conversation library:

Ana Dragić, Arsita Iswardhani, Mateusz Kowalczyk, Yon Natalie Mik, Nikola Mihov, Marco Pando.

Merve Bedir: »Scaffolding the Commons,« 2024, in: e-flux. Available online at: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/framing-renovation/608111/scaffolding-the-commons/ (accessed on January 21, 2025).

Nikola Mihov: HE BREAKS HE CUTS HE SPILLS. Paris 2021.

Victor Muñoz Saz: »Genes, Robots, and Toxicity: the Haunted Landscapes of Milk Production,« 2020. Available online at: https://www.akademie-solitude.de/de/solitude-journal/collective-care-response-ability/genes-robots-and-toxicity-the-haunted-landscapes-of-milk-production/ (accessed on January 21, 2025).

Trin T. Minh-ha: »The Image and the Void,« in: Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 15, Issue 1, 2016: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1470412915619458 (accessed on January 21, 2025).

Daniel Szalai: Novogen. Breda 2017–2018.

Nora Al Rahbani: »Why does Foucault call visibility a trap?« 2021. Available online at: https://www.academia.edu/57312238/Why_does_Foucault_call_visibility_a_trap_ (accessed on January 21, 2025).

Chef Ramza: The bleeding heart cookbook. 2004.

Donika Luzhnica, Jonas König: »Prishtina in 53 Buildings,« Munich 2022.

Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri: Ghost Work. How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass. Boston 2019.

Neda Atanasoski, Kalindi Vora: Surrogate Humanity. Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures. Chapel Hill 2019.

Aarti Sunder: Platforms: Around, Inbetween and Through. Singapore 2023.

Fares Chalabi: »The Present against the Past and the Future: Reclaiming the present as a strategy of cultural resistance in Post-War Lebanon,« in: Journal for the Critique of Science, Imagination, and New Anthropology, Ljubljana 2022.

Edward W. Said: »The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals,« in: The Public Intellectual, Hoboken 2002.

to be continued…