“I’m still me! Even if I can no longer perform the job,” said a former doctor who is now unable to work because of chronic illness. “But when I open my wardrobe, I still see, and can step into, all the roles I played in my work”.
What Is Work, Really?
Performing Working is an artistic research project that explores fundamental questions about the meaning of work. What is work, really? And what is it not? How can we work without exhausting ourselves or our environment? Who are we when we work, and who are we when we are excluded from work? What happens if we begin to use the term work for activities that are not usually recognised as work, such as being ill?
The project harnesses the ambiguities of the terms work and performance, bringing them together in a fertile crossover. If every job can be understood as a performance, what does that reveal about the demands work places on us, how it shapes our identities, and what we need to work in sustainable and joyful ways? By using performance as a research methodology, Performing Working investigates how artistic practice can generate new knowledge about work while also expanding the methods of artistic research itself.
The research also broadens the concept of work by examining roles and activities that often remain invisible, yet require essential forms of labour. These include the work of patients, care professionals, medical students, spectators, artworkers and artists. By looking across these different roles and work performances, the project explores how they can better understand, support and learn from one another.
As part of the research, Philippine Hoegen, together with Julia Reist and Miriam Hempel, initiated What is Work?
, a series of collaborations and interviews developed in partnership with Kunsthal Gent. Through conversations with a wide range of participants, the project investigates the many meanings of work and reflects on what we value and desire from it.
March 2022-March 2023
Principle researcher
Philippine Hoegen
Core team
Philippine Hoegen, Nirav Christophe, Sebastian Olma, Debbie Staverman, Veerle Spronck, Valentijn Byvanck, Stefan Geelen.
In Cooperation with
The Professorship Performative Creative Processes, HKU, Utrecht.
Caradt, Avans University, Breda.
Partners
Marres House for Contemporary Culture, Maastricht
UMCU – University Hospital of Utrecht.
Supported by
SIA KIEM
‘Performance is about engaging with versions of the self, stretching the gaze to see what others see when they look at you.’
Philippine Hoegen was a researcher within the Cultural and Creative Industries research group from 2016 until 2020. In that period, she also was a tutor at St. Joost School of Art & Design and the Master Institute of Visual Cultures. Currently Philippine works as an independent artist and researcher.
The research group Cultural and Creative Industries investigates the role of artists and designers as creative innovators and drivers of social and economic change. Affiliated researchers analyse the cultural and creative industries from a critical point of view and examine the conditions under which timely forms of aesthetic expression and social connectedness can actually take place within the precarious reality of this field. What economic models are required by artists and designers to create a meaningful practice within the aesthetic, social, and economic intentions of the cultural and creative industries? What skills sets are required for those artists and designers who don’t just want to follow movements, but actually shape novel social and economic models of the future?
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