The Young Curators Residency Programme, the curatorial platform I curated from 2018 to 2021, promoted by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo since 2007, took me to meet a large number of artists scattered in the peninsula every year, traveling together with a selected international pool of curators. It is not uncommon that our studio visits end up addressing an apparently secondary issue, namely what artists do when they are not practicing as artists – or rather, what artists do in order to be able to afford to be artists. 

The reality of the “second (third, fourth) job” is extremely common for those working in contemporary art in Italy. “What is your real job?” was the question posed in a project launched a few years ago by Lia Cecchin and Isamit Morales, in an ironic statement about how the artist’s profession is not taken seriously either by institutions or by the practitioners themselves. 

The answers to this question are usually varied: technician, graphic designer for advertising banners, invigilator, university teacher, secondary school teacher, primary school teacher, kindergarten teacher, shop assistant, garbage collector, plastic surgeon, waiter, bartender, and babysitter are among the jobs I have heard in the most recent encounters. According to data recently collected by Art Workers Italia and ACTA in the first sector survey dedicated to the analysis of the living conditions of art workers in Italy (2021), 79% of survey respondents hold more than one job, both within and outside contemporary art (39.8%). This choice, in the vast majority of cases, is motivated by the fact that the remuneration obtained from their main job in contemporary art is not sufficient to make a living. The data on income clearly confirms this: almost half of those who responded to the survey had an annual income of less than €10,000 in 2019, about 24% had an income between €10,000 and €20,000 and only 8% had an income of over €30,000 – including cash-in-hand work. 

These figures are particularly striking when combined with another fundamental fact, namely that 90% of the art workers who responded to the survey have specific training in the arts – in this case, around 86% have a master’s degree or higher, often obtained abroad (in 28% of cases). We can assume that the data specifically related to artists (a profession reported as “main” by a large proportion of the respondents) does not differ greatly from the general data described here. The fact that artists have side jobs beside their artistic careers is not new: Harun Farocki made “Bedtime Stories” for German TV for a while, which were short educational videos for children in which he often involved his daughters as actresses; Maurizio Cattelan is known to have worked as a gardener, waiter, aerialist and postman; Giosetta Fioroni designed stage costumes, while Pino Pascali made sets for RAI, the Italian television station. It would certainly be interesting to supplement the canonical artistic historiography with a critical analysis of the influence that artists’ side jobs have had on their artistic practice (and vice versa), but what I would like to stress here is instead a methodological discourse: how can the work of the artist be carried out when it is not protected, remunerated, and often not even really considered to be proper work? 

The problem goes beyond the purely economic question to the closely related issue of social recognition of the artist. The title “How can I explain to my mother that what I do is useful?”, given by the Oreste group (an art collective active in Italy at the end of the 1990s, translator’s note) at a conference in 1997, still seems to summarise a fundamental problem, which crosses the political, legal and cultural aspects of working in art. 

During the “journey through Italy” traced by this survey, I hope that keeping this constellation of thoughts in mind will provide the reader with useful coordinates on what lies before, after and around the artistic practices they will encounter: a small interpretive tool of the complexity, value and tenacity characteristic of artistic work in Italy.