Labor of Sleep / Technologies of Care

Labor of Sleep, Have you been able to change your habits?? consists of a series of short videos, commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, initially conceived to be screened on their website’s homepage at dawn and dusk. With this series, Giardina Papa reflects on the condition of sleep, which is increasingly threatened by ever more extended and frayed work rhythms, such as smart working or freelancing, or in general with precarious employment, but also by the pervasiveness of social networks, with their incitement to presenteeism and the so-called “FOMO”, fear of missing out. The videos satirise self-improvement apps, highlighting how rest time has become the new frontier from which to extract biometric and behavioural data. In fact, some apps, with the intention of optimising rest, turn sleep time into data, transforming sleep from the last frontier of resistance to productivity – the last refusal to work – into a timeframe from which digital capitalism can extract value.

In the second series of videos, Technologies of Care, Giardina Papa documents new ways of outsourcing affective labour through digital platforms. The videos explore topics such as empathy, precarity, and immaterial labour. Here we visualise the invisible workforce of online caregivers. The workers interviewed in Technologies of Care include an ASMR artist, an online dating coach, a fetish video performer and fairytale author, a social media fan-for-hire, a nail wrap designer, and a customer service operator. Based in Brazil, Greece, the Philippines, Venezuela, and the United States, they all work as anonymous freelancers, linked through third-party companies to clients all over the world. Through various websites and apps, they provide customers with bespoke goods and experiences, erotic stimulation, companionship, and emotional support. The stories collected in Technologies of Care also include those of non-human caregivers; in “Worker 7 – Bot? Virtual Boyfriend/Girlfriend”, the artist’s own three-month “relationship” with an interactive chatbot is documented.

Elisa Giardina Papa is an Italian artist whose work investigates gender, sexuality, and labor in relation to neoliberal capitalism and the borders of the Global South. Her work has been exhibited and screened at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA’s Modern Mondays), the Whitney Museum (Sunrise/Sunset Commission), Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2018, XVI Quadriennale di Roma, Rhizome (Download Commission), Flaherty NYC, Haus für elektronische Künste Basel, and ICA Milano, among others. Giardina Papa received an MFA from RISD, and she is currently pursuing a PhD in film, media, and gender studies at the University of California Berkeley. She lives and works in New York and Sant’Ignazio, Sicily. Giardina Papa is also a founding member of the artist collective Radha May.