Mom, I want to be an artist!
Notes on the status of some workers in the image production field, here and now. 

 

Representation as communication and as (re)production of reality(ies)

You should better take a competitive examination, baby.... as smart as you are ... you could get any career ...I do not know ... you might have a vocation, but you could also do it as a hobby, don’t you? ... It’s up to you ... but you'll die of hunger!
This was (and still remains), more or less, the reaction of our closest (especially if we are born in the bosom of a working class family with a distant or nonexistent relationship to any field of cultural production) to the answer to our uncertain future career.
The truth is that in the current conditions of production of representation within the Spanish state, practically in all its aspects (especially in the most critical and/or less commercial ones), some of their dark expectations are met. In what mom was wrong, however, is in thinking that instability, deregulation and limited or lack of remuneration for the work done would only affect those “creative”, “less serious” jobs that, in many cases, didn’t/doesn’t have even the social consideration of "employment" and that also appeared linked to forms of life, at least, "irregular" and rather unfavourable for social promotion.
Even so, we persevere, and after a period of studies more or less related to image or self-taught education, we are immersed in a work without timetables or recognition, often without a contract, a "job" which is not considered as "employment ", a sort of “indefinite volunteering” that leans on a dubious and egotistic conception of talent from which we are expected to get tired of sooner or later.

*This text is part of the book "A la deriva por los circuitos de la precariedad femenina" edited by Precarias a la Deriva (Traficantes de Sueños, Madrid, 2004).

mama,_quiero_ser_artista-2003.pdf

Mom,_I_want_to_be_an_artist2003.pdf