Precarious objects: Activism and design in Italy

By Ilaria Vanni

Precarious objects explores the traffic between design and activism by telling stories drawn from contemporary counter-precarity cases in Italy. As a category of labour and of global social experience in general, precarity is a wicked problem that affects all aspects of life, regulating the production and circulation of a wide range of material and immaterial effects. In this book, three microhistories of counter-precarity explore existent forms of resistance and resilience to precarity. Drawing on ethnographies and archives and bringing together debates from design theory, cultural studies and geography, this study shows how design objects and practices recode political communication and reorient how things are imagined, produced and circulated. It also shows how design as a practice can reconfigure material conditions and prefigure ways to repair some of the effects of precarity on everyday life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526135551

Book preview

Introduction: design, activism and precarity

Why save the world when you can design it? (Serpica Naro, 2005)

On 29 February 2004, a procession took to the streets of Milan. It was an ordinary Sunday, traditionally a day off in Italy. A small group of people, including a nun, a friar and even a cardinal, carried the statue of a saint to a local supermarket that was open, despite the fact that it was a Sunday. The saint was odd-looking: it had too many arms, was dressed in workers’ overalls, and carried a portion of chips, a phone and a newspaper open at the jobs pages. Once inside the supermarket, the faithful offered the saint liberated bottles of wine and sausages, intoned a prayer and distributed prayer cards to customers and workers. ‘And on the seventh day God rested from his work’, the cardinal chanted on a loudspeaker, ‘San Precario, free these workers from having to work on a Sunday, lower prices, give back our Sundays as a day of rest.’¹

This was the first outing for San Precario, the fictitious patron saint of precarious workers, invented by the Milanese activist group Chainworkers.² In 2004 and 2005 the saint materialised in several Italian cities, taking multiple forms (and genders). In order to mobilise support for precarious workers, the saint was represented in statues, digital and printed images and videos in parades, interventions in a variety of workplaces, and even in film festivals and fashion shows. San Precario quickly became a symbol of the growing counter-precarity movement that spread throughout Italy and then Europe in the mid-2000s. But San Precario also marks a shift in activist repertoires from forms of direct action such as boycotts, rallies, demonstrations or marches, to an orientation towards the production and circulation of visual and material artefacts and events. As such, San Precario serves as a good introduction to the theme of this book – design activism in the context of precarity in Italy (see Plate 1). To understand the distinctiveness of San Precario, and to begin to outline the genealogy of the cases presented in this book, it is useful to consider the diversity of repertoires adopted by different grassroot groups and collectives in the early 2000s. Alice Mattoni, in her critical study and analysis of precarity and media practices in Italy, argues that one of the challenges of counter-precarity activism at the start was to construct precarity as a political category able to define the conditions of workers in different sectors.³ This plurality of experiences, she continued, was reflected in the variety of the repertoires of contention. Mattoni shows how in some cases activists adopted and adapted modes of protest which were already part of labour movements’ contentious repertoire, such as strikes, pickets, rallies and marches. This was the case, for instance, of strikes promoted by Precari Atesia, the precarious workers in a large call centre. Others preferred tactics from 1977 Italian social movements, such as la spesa proletaria, the practice of determining and applying discounts to the prices of goods, enacted by the network Reddito per Tutti (Income for All), and occupazioni, the occupation of generally public spaces, such as La Sapienza University in Rome, occupied by precarious researchers in 2005.⁴

San Precario reconfigured some of these contentious practices. For instance, a march became a procession, the saint performed la spesa proletaria, and on one occasion the statue of the saint temporarily occupied the stage at the Venice Film Festival.⁵ The success of the saint as a symbol of grassroots activist organisations was the result of multiple factors. Some of these dynamics were contextual. The growth of precarity itself – in terms of numbers of workers employed in insecure positions, the legislation that normalised such contracts and the public discourse on labour-market flexibility — was of course a contributing aspect, as I will explain in the next section on precarity.⁶ The stirring of local activism as a result of local factors, such as the history of social movements in Italy, coupled with new energies and ideas coming from worldwide anti-globalisation protests, was another.⁷

When I started following San Precario through videos and images sent by friends involved in the events, websites and email lists, it was clear that contextual reasons alone could not explain why the saint had become so pervasive so quickly (see Plate 2).⁸ Categories like guerrilla communication, tactical media and media activism offered a framework to understand the shift towards the visual, communicative and cultural elements that animated the beginnings of counter-precarity campaigns.⁹ Yet, a question remained: how did San Precario use communicative, cultural and aesthetic elements to build a wider political and social community?

San Precario was first and foremost imagined as a campaigning artefact able to tap into the increasingly frequent experience of precarity and reach not-yet-politicised precarious workers. First, San Precario recoded the cultural grammar of a popular and immediately recognisable and relatable (at least in Italy) tradition, that of Catholic patron saints. In Catholic conventions each saint takes care of and is worshipped by a specific category, generally in reference to the saint’s life. For instance, St Honoré is the patron saint of bakers, St Gabriel of postal workers, St Thomas More of lawyers, and so on. The expression non so a che santo votarmi (I don’t know which saint to pray to) is used in Italian, often ironically, to express loss of hope or a particularly thorny situation. Precarious workers, unrepresented and unrecognised as a specific category, had no patron saint to pray to, so one was invented, borrowing from the formulaic elements of popular religion. San Precario was given a biographical narrative of trials and tribulations based on the genre of saints’ lives, a prayer modelled on the Catholic Lord’s Prayer (but asking for paid maternity leave, protection for workers in insecure positions, holidays, pension contributions and income), his own celebration day being the most ‘intermittent’ day of the calendar, 29 February. In this way, ‘San Precario functions as a rhetorical device to move into the public arena a critical awareness of the changes in conditions and forms of work, of the shift from permanent positions to casual [precario/a] modes of employment.’¹⁰

Second, the saint card, designed by the Chainworkers Crew after a work by Canadian artist Chris Woods, depicts a white man in a blue-collar work uniform, kneeling, hands in prayer, with iconographic symbols of the rights claimed by precarious workers: the euro sign for income, a house for housing, a heart for affects, a satellite for communication, a bus for transport. This image could be read, by those familiar with the cultural grammar described above (i.e. the majority of Italians), as a humorous rerouting of popular religion. But the graphics set this image apart: the card is professionally designed; it uses an aqua/green palette, it is dotted with stars and framed by a decorative pattern. The typeface references traditional saint cards. In brief, it mobilises a happy, pop imagery instead of using styles generally associated with social movements, such as stencilled images, linocuts or signs recognisable as political (such as raised fists, for instance). In addition to this, the image lent itself to be further stylised, and it was reproduced, like a logo, by different groups harnessing the communicative reach of all sorts of digital and material media, from websites to posters and badges. The use of digital media in particular made it possible to circulate the image, and thus connect and grow constellations of counter-precarity activists.

As material objects San Precario cards were printed on smooth paper that invited touch and fitted into the palm of the hand. These cards, the different statues of San Precario, enrolled affects to generate a sense of shared experiences and articulated emerging political subjectivities. In other words, San Precario constituted a moment of intensification, which, in Guy Julier’s terms, engaged bodily dispositions and emotions, and also had a politicising function.¹¹ As a campaigning artefact, San Precario was an example of what Tony Fry calls ‘recoding’: the creation of a collision of meanings that disrupts the representational order. Recoding ‘centres on the transformation of the sign value of objects, images, structures, spaces, services and organizations’, subtracting the sign value from the realm of economy and moving it into the realm of the political.¹² In this manner, San Precario, intended as a figuration and as digital and material objects that manifest this figuration, can be defined as an initial gesture towards design interventions, prompting a different way of thinking about activism and being activists. San Precario also marks the beginning of the research that led to this book.

My interest in precarity and activism started with a project to analyse the contact zones between art and activism. As happens with projects that involve empirical research, the convincing approach and theoretical framework I had built did not survive the reality of fieldwork. The activists I met did not talk in terms of art practices, but in terms of being in design and media industries environments. Events, objects and ideas resisted the definition of art. There were no major exhibitions in galleries or museums dedicated to art. On the contrary, objects like those created around the figuration of San Precario oriented me towards other conceptualisations, such as visual and material culture and design.

Borrowing from feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed, I refer to these kinds of objects as orientation devices.¹³ ‘Orientations’, Ahmed writes, ‘are about how we begin, how we proceed from here.’¹⁴ Some objects, particularly those that enable us to do things, orient us in a specific direction. The proximity between objects and bodies and contact with objects shape our bodies, our gestures, and how we are oriented in the world. Ahmed asks:

What does it mean to be oriented? How is it that we come to find our way in a world that acquires new shapes, depending on which way we turn? If we know where we are, when we turn this way or that, then we are oriented. We have our bearings. We know what to do to get to this place or to that. To be oriented is also to be oriented toward certain objects, those that help us find our way.¹⁵

The objects in this book are orientation devices because they helped me to find my bearings, but also because they orient others towards certain politics, actions, gestures and dispositions. Orientation devices open up the possibility of becoming political and generate material spaces where these possibilities can emerge. Before exploring these orientation devices in the following chapters a certain measure of context must be established. First, it is necessary to sketch a summary of the relevant positions in the literature on activism from the early 2000s onwards. I first outline relevant points on the debate on cultural activism. Then I move to a discussion on design activism that constitutes the framework of this book. Finally, I summarise relevant ideas about precarity.

From creative interventions to design activism

Precarious objects explores the traffic between design and activism by telling stories drawn from contemporary counter-precarity cases in Italy. It shows how design objects and practices become means of resistance as a recoding of political communication and of resilience in terms of the reorientation of how things are imagined, produced and circulated. It also shows how design as a practice can reconfigure material conditions and prefigure ways to repair some of the effects of precarity on everyday life.

The focus on counter-precarity allows me to show how the political emerges outside the boundaries of organised politics and how, to paraphrase Tony Fry, change arrives from outside existing political discourse.¹⁶ This approach is by no means new, and in fact it is also at the core of Italian radical thought (specifically in operaismo, or workerism, in the 1960s and early 1970s). In 1964, the philosopher Mario Tronti invited activists and theorists ‘to turn the problem on its head, reverse the position, and start again from the beginning’ and bring the focus on workers’ struggles to understand capitalism and capitalist society.¹⁷ In operaismo this meant to pay attention to wildcat strikes and forms of contestation of workers not organised into parties or unions. In the early twenty-first century it means to start from counter-precarity activism.

Consequently, the three chapters following the introduction will engage with other concepts first articulated by thinkers in the area of operaismo, and generally what is referred to as ‘autonomist Marxism’. The exploration of changing modes of work, the expansion of work from the factory to the city itself, and the increasing relevance of immaterial labour even in material practices are some of these shared concerns. However, although the history of social movements in Italy – from Potere Operaio in the 1960s and early 1970s, to Autonomia in the 1970s, to Italian feminisms, the emergence of social centres in the 1990s and the rich experimentation with citizen media from the 1970s onwards – are the historical background to these three cases, they are outside the scope of this book. This is both for practical reasons (it would take several books and several writers to undertake such a history) and also for contextual reasons. In the complex constellation of Italian activism and social movements the modalities of organisation, practices and repertoire distinguish the cases of Precarious Objects from operaismo and Autonomia proper. In establishing this distinction, I extend and depart from the well-known body of literature and exhibitions exploring the key roles of communication, the visual arts, the media, performance and music in shaping meaning, articulating identity and generating a culture of social movements. The following two sections outline the relevant points in the debates on cultural and design activism.

Cultural and creative activism

The repertoire developed by many of the activists involved in counter-precarity contestations mobilised and hacked communication, media, design and other creative practices, and marked a shift from forms of militant politics, like street protests, rallies and marches. This transition to creative and communicative forms in the late 1990s and early 2000s was shared by other movements and encouraged a debate ‘to treat the aesthetic as a directly political terrain’.¹⁸ The difference between militant modes of protest and new tactics was captured in a statement about guerrilla communication posted on the listserv Nettime, a forum that hosted a lively debate on cultural activism:

Guerrilla communication doesn’t focus on arguments and facts like most leaflets, brochures, slogans or banners. In it’s [sic] own way, it inhabits a militant political position, it is direct action in the space of social communication. But different from other militant positions (stone meets shop window), it doesn’t aim to destroy the codes and signs of power and control, but to distort and disfigure their meanings as a means of counteracting the omnipotent prattling of power. Communication guerrillas do not intend to occupy, interrupt or destroy the dominant channels of communication, but to detourn [sic] and subvert the messages transported.¹⁹

Recoding and subverting messages and creating playful disruptions to intervene in dominating power structures became common practice in activists’ repertoires. Rita Raley, concentrating on digital media activism, described the shift from ‘the storming of the barricades’ to politics that overlap with creative practices to engage, intervene and educate beyond the value of the prank. This shift, she argued, corresponds to a change in the nature of power itself, from a centralised entity to a nomadic one, and results as a response to post-industrial society and neoliberal globalisation.²⁰ Marco Deseriis offered a genealogy of knowledge of historical struggles ‘from below’: the use of collective fictional names in different periods as specific modes of action that perform politically and aesthetically. Collective names, Deseriis argued, provide symbolic power, mediate identity among their users, and express a process of subjectification.²¹ Anja Kanngieser contributed to the debate with an analysis of the crossover between art practices and activism in Germany. Kanngieser presents a genealogy of experimental politics, from the Berlin Dadaists’ communicative, interactive, political tactics to counter the rhetoric of war to the 2000s movements that reclaimed the Commons and advocated for free movement. The author theorised the transformative potential of ‘the performative encounter’. This is intended as performative practices directed to activate social relations different from those produced by capitalism, and aimed at opening up the possibilities to make different worlds.²²

Other researchers have considered specific forms, such as the internet as art, the overlapping of experimental art and performance with social practices and the use of performative approaches that act as catalysts to interrupt and reconfigure social relations.²³ Disobedient Objects, an exhibition curated by Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and toured internationally, offered the most comprehensive survey to date of objects as tools of social and political mobilisation, concentrating on objects used in protests.²⁴ Anna Feigenbaum has similarly explored the material culture of the Occupy movement, arguing that objects such as tents and tear gas are another form of media to communicate and mediate political struggles.²⁵

Scholars writing about counter-precarity activism and close to the theory and practices developing in this movement captured the importance of this move towards cultural and creative activism. Isabell Lorey, for instance, writing about mobilisations in Europe in the early 2000s, stressed that, from its beginnings, the debate on precarity flourished in cultural and artistic settings rather than in more traditional social and political contexts.²⁶ Maurizio Lazzarato demonstrated that in France, resistance to precarisation was at first successfully organised by workers in the performing arts and culture. This movement also put forward a process of indemnification that would cover all temporary (intermittents et précaires, intermittent and precarious) workers. One of the intermittents’ slogans, ‘no culture without social rights’, summarised the entanglement of the discourse on social justice with cultural production.²⁷ Alice Mattoni examined media practices with relation to the organisation of counter-precarity activism and, with Nicola Doerr, the importance of visual analysis in understanding the movement’s dynamics.²⁸

This literature has extended the definition of the political and established a critical genealogy to think about the intermingling of creative and political practices. Some tactics and techniques,