Corridor8 Director Lauren Velvick speaks to José Garcia Oliva, a Venezuelan multidisciplinary artist who is based in London and was recently commissioned by Lancaster Arts for the participatory project Traces and exhibition Out of Hours. Oliva’s practice reacts to hidden socio-political oppressions, exposing them through participatory performances or public interventions. The outcome of his work is usually an enactment of social exchanges or provocations shaped by the commons, site-specificity and spontaneity. His practice is research-led and situated at the intersection of identity, labour and place. He works with drawing, sculpture, participatory performance and writing. Oliva is a graduate from the Royal College of Art and currently teaches at Kingston School of Art and Ravensbourne University.
Lauren Velvick: I think that because your work is so concerned with labour structures and maintenance it makes sense to begin by talking about how we first met, both as a starting point to discuss how your work has developed and to draw a parallel with our own working lives in the arts outside of the public instances of workshops, exhibitions and publications.
At the start of 2020 I was working part-time as a Creative Producer for Lancaster Arts, and you were selected to be part of the DIY programme run by Live Art Development Agency in collaboration with various organisations around the country, Lancaster Arts being one of them. The beginning of 2020 is also, of course, when the UK started responding to the COVID-19 pandemic with lockdowns, as was the case in Lancashire, and so at the time we were all working entirely remotely.
I remember being excited by your proposal and how your work drew on Maintenance Art of the 1970s to perform an institutional critique of your own Art School in the present, and feeling like it was especially poignant given how Covid was enforcing a new regime of cleanliness. Could you reflect on that experience and give some background about your practice and why you chose to apply?
Jose Garcia Oliva: My background is in drawing and painting and at that time my practice was passive, isolated, and somewhat rigid. I was producing work that could be framed and hung on a wall, still exploring the notion of ‘not belonging’ but in a quieter manner, which didn’t make me feel particularly excited. I began to shift my approach to incorporate more participatory art-making and to explore new methods of collaboration. I wanted to use my skills as an artist and platforms I have access to, to facilitate open conversations and collectively decide what to visually materialise. The initial discussions that I hosted primarily focused on cultural heritage, migrant labour, and how these factors shape our identities and self-worth.
When I started my MA in 2018 I noticed how institutions often mirror social and class hierarchies in their own internal structures. There was much discussion about decolonising the curriculum, while the reality outside the classroom told a different story where you could see outsourced Latinx cleaners emptying the bins and African security staff guarding the buildings. It struck me as an example of theoretical ideas remaining unapplied, and once you become aware of these contradictions (and you bear witness), you can either choose to remain apathetic or you can decide to talk about it.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! was a key reference for me. Her poignant question; ‘After the revolution, who will pick up the garbage on Monday morning?’ resonated with the reality that after academic discussions about decolonial studies, we have to ask who will wipe the desks in the evening? Another reference on my radar was the performative piece ‘Street Cleaning Event’, (1963) by Hi-Red Centre. In this work, the artists cleaned the streets of Tokyo during the 1964 Olympic Games, responding to the government’s call for the city to present a clean image to the world. This performance highlighted how cleanliness is often associated with showing progress and wealth, but at what cost and to whom is the question I’m interested in.
In the UK, considered one of the cleanest countries in the world, the cleaning industry is among the top ten most profitable, and the one with the highest number of non-British workers who often earn below the living wage. This not only raises issues of low pay in stereotypical migrant labour roles for the sake of profit for bosses and shareholders, but also reflects a broader picture of the long-term exploitative effects of post-colonial power and wealth accumulation. These conditions influence international standards while creating a facade of a tidy, well-behaved, and organised society.
When COVID-19 arrived, it altered our perception of cleanliness and heightened our fear of invisible germs. However, the recognition of cleaners (and other ‘key-workers’) was temporary and theatrical, marked by moments like the doorstep clapping (in which I participated, too) celebrating their work. A few years later, when talking with Angela Chesters, a cleaner at Lancaster University, she poignantly remarked, ‘How long before the clapping stops? When did the curtains fall and render us invisible again?’.
When the lockdown occurred, it was challenging to work with the people I had already connected with. That’s when I decided to apply for the DIY program funded by the Live Art Development Agency. This platform allowed me to reach a wider audience across the UK. I remember that one of my conditions was to encourage people working in cleaning services to apply. We had three cleaners and a guest lecturer who had previously worked as a cleaner. The event was titled White Vinegar: Cleaning as a Socio-Political Performative Action. Talking about cleaning involves discussing domestic work, race, gender, social status, and invisible labour. Washing implies the removal of dirt, but also potentially sins, sickness, and imperfections. Being clean is associated with purity, morality, skin colour, and religion. The conversations that emerged from this event continue to inform my work today.
(LV) Your artworks seem to hinge on creating sustained relationships with people in roles that could be considered antithetical to those of ‘the artist’, whereby artists are popularly assumed to exercise a high level of autonomy and to be led by their individual creative vision.
(JGO) There is still this romanticism of the individual artist as a genius and a master, a notion that plays into a shared desire to perceive artworks with an aura; the real object touched by a talented individual. This is a very Gombrich-like understanding of masterpieces and the history of art. This idea is today reinforced by competitive unpaid open calls, the precarious lottery-like artist lifestyle, needing to earn the friendship of patrons to support individual practices. All of this encourages artists to have an individualistic approach; they must sell themselves as unique figures in response to the cockfight applauded by the people in positions to judge what’s valuable and who gets to be remembered. As a result of this culture of salvense quien pueda (everyone for themselves), I have seen how the students that I teach struggle to work collaboratively and sustain solidarity upon this hostile ground.
Therefore, I believe that the most meaningful artwork you can make today is to build friendships and relationships that go beyond a creative workshop or another artistic outcome. You can exchange love, company, skills, hobbies, passions, etc. but what matters most is the exchange itself so all you really need is time and ears. I’m interested in finding new forms to facilitate the sharing of authorship and financial profit. I have to be aware of my position, my interests, and what I as an artist and lecturer can bring to the table. Every time I start a project, I write down my intentions and what I can offer, which is how I approach people to work with, after that the relationship that emerges is a result of the time spent working together. For example with Lancaster University’s cleaning staff, I have worked with some of them for over four years, and we now have a comradeship beyond the commission. For this to happen, I believe, transparency is key so that everyone knows what you are about, what you want to get out of the project and what they can get out of it too. For example, if I am given a budget and a space to show work, I can share these with others to communicate a shared interest or to simply try something collectively. What matters is that my individual artistic goals don’t get in the way; I need to be open to changes. Most of the time the outcome is richer when more voices are included. It is truly more demanding and time-consuming, but also more enriching.
Something important to highlight is that the longer you work with an institution, the more you understand the power dynamics within; the secret barriers and institutional hypocrisy are hard to hide for more than a month, so the more you dig in, the more you understand what is worth challenging. Many organisations when commissioning work that engages with local groups offer only a short timeline, a checklist of goals and a marketing team that is happy to use images of a diverse audience without actually considering how to sustain relationships. The shared experience of making is my ultimate goal when making art and that’s why we need time set aside before making, during making and after making.
(LV) Whereas people working in a call centre, for example, would be reading from a script, as in ‘How May I Serve You’, where you were in conversation with customer service agents based in Pakistan.
(JGO) ‘How May I Serve’ was intended to create a space where call centre agents from Islamabad, Pakistan, outsourced by UK companies could talk about their own experiences on their own terms. In their working lives they aren’t allowed to use their real profile pictures or names and have to avoid having a foreign English accent, so with this project I wanted to create a space where they didn’t have to follow a rudimentary script. The website for this project featured a biographical profile for Saadia Abbasi and Malik Ayaz, along with the comparative time zones of Pakistan and the United Kingdom. It mimics the design of a live-chat service, and allowed people to engage in one-on-one open conversations with either individual. The project’s goal was to connect participants with the agents in an environment without any commodities involved, but rather a space for dialogue. Ultimately the conversations were archived in a publication, aiming to expose and archive the socio-economic oppression in our current system of global outsourcing, and its political effects. As Oliver Marchart notes in Conflictual Aesthetics: ‘A political situation cannot simply be constructed; it must also be encountered’. For me, this means that public participation is essential.
In a wider sense beyond the direct relations of individuals, the project highlights the international power dynamic whereby some of the countries providing services have been previously colonised by the countries demanding them. Spain, for instance, operates many call centres working for national companies in different countries in South America. The United Kingdom also parallels this relationship between customer/service – coloniser/colonised. Pakistan is one of the leading countries that the United Kingdom outsources its call centres to, along, of course, with India. Among the reasons for this are their imposed fluent English and the availability of low-cost labour. This political and economic position in both countries creates a rigid power system where one monopolises and the other serves.
(LV) How do you navigate the power dynamics in these relationships?
(JGO) It’s challenging to maintain horizontal dynamics, but not impossible if you share decision-making with participants, so they are active rather than passive. Also, every project is different and needs different accommodations. For example, with ‘How May I Serve You’ it was important to acknowledge everyone’s area of expertise, so I was in charge of the visual language of the website and the construction of the site, but anything to do with the content of the live-chat software was led by Ayaz and Abbasi. I didn’t know anything about the vocabulary, the back-end infrastructure or the data collection in live-chats. So from the start, we divided tasks and we had meetings every week to check progress. In that context, my role was to facilitate a platform where Ayaz and Abbasi could lead the conversations and represent themselves.
I’m keen on finding ways to illustrate work inequalities with, for and by the people working in the chosen roles. Similarly, with ‘Traces’, where cleaners highlighted the lack of recognition from academics and managers at Lancaster University (a reflection of societal preconceptions that place those who clean at the bottom of the hierarchy) I always used the aesthetic, tools and platform attached to their labour as cleaners, but subverted it enabling the participants to express themselves in the way they want to. I avoid creating paintings of workers’ struggles from observation, but rather give the brushes to them, and to follow this analogy, you could say that the brush width is decided by me, but what they paint with it is decided by them.
(LV) What is next for your practice; are you moving forward with aspects of what you have discovered over the past four years, or are you taking some time to reflect now?
I wish I had more time for reflection and detailed writing about my past projects, but time has become scarce since teaching now occupies a large portion of my week. Also, as soon as I finish a commission or large project, I have to start thinking about where the next grant will come from and of course many hours of unpaid work go into putting together proposals to get funding and develop future projects. In this uncertain cycle, you have to work with the time you got. I now see my teaching practice as a critical space to unpack the social methodologies and ethics of working with people, sharing these with students for open discussions, and integrating the conceptual and aesthetic choices from my practice into some of the content of my teaching sessions. So, I’m at a point where teaching, as well as giving me some level of financial stability, also provides me with an environment for reflection and thought expansion.
It’s also important to mention that taking on teaching as my second practice is an intentional choice to avoid becoming dependent on commercialising my art practice. This has been a difficult decision and process, but I believe (though it may not be true for everyone) that once your artwork becomes your primary income, its quality, aesthetics, and intentions are shaped more by buyers than by the content itself. However, it’s true that if you don’t commercialise your art, it becomes more challenging to keep your practice alive—this is the dichotomy I find myself in at the moment.
Looking ahead, and in relation to this conversation, I am excited about the possibility of securing funding to write a book in collaboration with Angela Chester, one of the cleaners at Lancaster University. The book would explore the processes and relationships developed over four years of collaborative work, delving into social preconceptions, work tasks, and the desire for art-making to be a space of possibilities and speculative new realities.
Traces was on show at the Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster University 24 April – 31 May 2024, and in 2023 García Oliva undertook a Participation Residency at Gasworks, London, creating an open platform in collaboration with various independent unions to discuss and raise awareness about workers’ rights, and translate them into collective action through creative means. One of the project’s legacies is the creation of the first Latin American Protest Archive, which was developed in collaboration with CAIWU, IWGB, UVW, and LAWRS, with support from Gasworks.
This conversation was supported by José Garcia Oliva by contributing editorial fees in line with our Supported Content Model to enable our continued work.
Published 08.09.2024 by Lauren Velvick in Interviews
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