Artistic work is a privilege. To work with and from what you love. To debate, discuss, negotiate and share. No one but yourself sets the timetables, establishes the goals, or decides the hows. Our practice implies examining, considering and traversing difference, making a contribution. To reflect, participate and generate criticism, to open spaces for dissidence, for other ways of feeling and thinking. Our work takes place in the common, in the public. It constitutes us.

But the commitment to art as a way of life has its trade-offs. We work in an opaque and capricious system in which interests are intertwined within decisions. We often accept endless working hours that are poorly paid or without financial compensation. We sometimes adopt a competitive relationship with our peers, feeling obliged to fight for positions and resources. We live in and with precariousness.

How can we break these perverse dynamics? Is it possible to create an artistic environment that leaves behind the inherent precarity that the labour of creation entails? In the context of these and other questions we present the exhibition Trouble in Paradise, a curatorial project by the Prekariart research team. In it we try to share a viewpoint for the problematisation of attitudes and behaviours that address both the individual and the institutional, a questioning to which we consider it necessary to contribute.

Artists:

María Alcaide

Ignacio García Sánchez 

Cristina Garrido 

Beatriz Sánchez 

Somos Nosotros 

Oriol Vilanova 

Werker Collective