Essential Work: Eastern European Immigrants and Models of Participation

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between a marginalised community of essential workers and dominant models of participation. I focus on Agri-Care, The Royals, and Alien Species, projects created in collaboration between Eastern European seasonal agricultural workers in Jersey and the artist Alicja Rogalska, and analyse them through a productive confrontation with theories of participation. I begin by juxtaposing Jacques Rancière’s ideas of aesthetic regime as interpreted by Claire Bishop, to Rogalska’s sculpting workshops conducted with Jersey Royal potato pickers. I argue that Rogalska shifts the aesthetic experience from audiences onto participants, repositioning ‘unskilled’, manual labour as craft, and uncovering seasonal workers as craftspeople, holding expertise. As a result, Rogalska disassembles the idea of low-skilled labour. The article then confronts Miwon Kwon’s ideas of a disobedient community with Rogalska’s making of a community, ostensibly coherent and ‘compliant’ but subverting the fleeting group of temporary workers into a permanent precariat, the backbone of the local economy. The participatory process and its subsequent introduction into the local archives, I argue, impose a different relation between permanent and temporary locals of Jersey, with the latter now embedded into local institutions. I end by considering why these participatory projects seem incompatible with theories on participation and suggest this incompatibility stems from the arts’ preoccupation with virtuosic labour. The concept of artists as the ultimate precarious workers of late-capitalism, I argue, excludes the communities at the extreme of late capitalist exploitation from artistic attention and the scope of art subsidy, depoliticising art practice in the process.