Vista de sala de la exposición. Efrén Álvarez. Económicos, 2011

Efrén Álvarez

Económicos

sábado 12 marzo 2011
3:01
Politics
Photography
Painting

This interview contains excerpts from a telephone conversation with Efrén Álvarez, organised around two questions. The first refers to form and the use of diagrams as a technology for representing social dynamics. The second concerns the bases or themes of the work that some of these diagrams deal with. The labour relations presented here are measured more by information than by the labour power or time used, therefore depicting cycles that are difficult to break. As he explains in the conversation, they do not represent people, but rather contracting parties, icons of the system of production that have nothing to do with individuals or people and therefore do not reflect the true complexity of the structures of power that, according to Michel Foucault, form the basis of personal relationships. Despite presenting the diagram as technology, Foucault refers to a linguistic mechanism that tries to resolve the exercise of not calling things by their names, a practice that human resources departments in companies have learned to take advantage of in a sinister way.

Efrén Álvarez explains his intention to invert this economic euphemism and call things by their rightful names, not using words, but using drawings, at a time when there is little hope that words like ‘businessman’ and ‘worker’ can recover their meaning. The human question is precisely what Efrén Álvarez has eliminated from his diagrams, trying to emulate an employment contract. This question – the human, personal and individual question – as in Nicolas Klotz’ 2007 film La question humaine, is the very one that has disappeared forever from ‘just business’, capitalism’s banner question.

Production

José Luis Espejo

Locution

Luis Mata

License
Creative Commons by-nc 4.0

Efrén Álvarez

Económicos

Efrén Álvarez. Económicos. From 2 February to 30 May 2011

Efrén Álvarez, artist: The exhibition Económicos is a collection of homemade experiments on the technique of diagrams, to construct a tragic tale about social relations in work and the economy. The diagram is a historical technique, a graph where some aspects of reality disappear and others are synthesised. Questions of magnitude like distance disappear. They only present the relations between elements and somewhat representative icons. I’m hopeful about the new technique of the diagram applied to social materials using emerging statistics.

In some cases, this application is smaller than the Internet, but it is an emerging technology and this part of the exhibition promotes this technology. These diagrams present the structure of work. One of the questions that interested me was to present work within a particular informative and legal structure.

The contractual structure of a company is well represented, as is the information structure that is produced as an intersecting twin between different things from legal and cultural networks. In social conditions, it attempts to represent the difference in information for a person participating in one of these contractual structures and someone who is an active and creative part of the same system with different decision-making capacities and opportunities. This is a little dangerous and some people may not like seeing a worker compared to a slave. One common aspect between these two ways of participating in the productive apparatus of society is presented. In both cases, the actors are dependent on knowledge they do not participate in.