“In the context of post-pandemic reckonings, the idea of labor as an unpaid debt represents itself as that of a heroic sacrifice remunerated by applause”

Angela Mitropoulos, Pandemonium, Proliferating Borders of Capital and the Pandemic Swerve, 2020, Pluto Press

On Necessary Work is a three-day study group organized by Adelita Husni Bey and the Department of Drawing and Printmaking, Victorian College of the Arts, with support from the Centre of Visual Art at the University of Melbourne. It is co-presented with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School in conjunction with Adelita Husni Bey’s These Conditions, an exhibition and pedagogical film set at the Brooklyn Army Terminal (February 8 through April 8, 2022). Adelita Husni Bey is a 2020–2022 Fellow at the Vera List Center and a 2020–2021 Fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts.

At the time of writing Melbourne has gone from being the most locked-down city in the world to have one of the highest rates of infection with the Omicron variant, but public health measures have kept the death toll in the state of Victoria to just over 2000. Meanwhile, the state of New York, which began gradually reopening in July 2021, confronts a death toll that has surpassed 65,000. New York state has roughly three times the population of Victoria, which means that the death toll has been roughly ten times greater than in Victoria. This study group will help us reflect on international strategies and protocols in response to COVID-19, underpinned by previous pandemics, ideologies, and infrastructures. By engaging voices with different experiences of the current pandemic across distant geographies, the group will explore how material conditions have been reconfigured for workers, especially those who hold “reproductive” functions in society.

The study group convenes around the concept of ‘necessary work’ as a cipher for what undergirds and normalizes capitalist production in crisis, following a Marxist feminist understanding of reproductive labor. On this occasion, we also study the language used in protocols that insist on the necessity of work during the pandemic by assigning ‘critical’ status to certain infrastructural and industrial sectors by shifting risk, coded as ‘responsibility ’ to the workers. For instance, we explore the guidelines issued by the US government on the 19th of March 2020, which state that: “in a critical infrastructure industry… such as healthcare services and pharmaceutical and food supply and instructing them: you have a special responsibility to maintain” your “normal work schedule.”

The first hour, which is open to the public, will be dedicated to one or more speaker presentations followed by a Q&A. During the second part of the event Adelita Husni Bey, supported by Alex Martinis Roe (VCA), will offer exercises to embody and develop a somatic relation to the text assigned by the guest speaker in the more intimate setting of the study group that is open to VCA students only.

The study group will take place in three 1-hour sessions: Thursday, February 17; Thursday, March 10; and Thursday, March 17,  7–8 pm Eastern  Time. (Friday, March 18; Friday, March 11; and Friday, March 18, 9 am – 10 am Australian Eastern Standard Time). Dates are subject to change and a full speaker line up to be announced. All events will be held online, via Zoom, unless otherwise specified.

Thursday, February 17, 7 pm EST Guest speaker: Rob Wallace

Rob Wallace is an evolutionary epidemiologist with the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps in St Paul. His work primarily addresses the ways agriculture impacts public health. Wallace is co-author of a number of technical works, including Neoliberal Ebola: Modeling Disease Emergence from Finance to Forest and Farm. He is also the author of two essay collections: Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science and Dead Epidemiologists: One the Origins of COVID-19. He has consulted for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Thursday, March 10, 7 pm EST Guest speakers: Imogen Beynon and Consuelo Vargas

Imogen Beynon is a Deputy Director at the United Workers Union, a trade union representing over 150,000 workers in 45+ industries–including early childhood education and care, aged care, hospitality, logistics, manufacturing, and more. Imogen is also an Employee Director of industry superannuation fund, Hostplus, and a current board member of NAVA. Her professional experience includes senior leadership positions in government with key responsibilities across industrial law, strategic leadership, regulation, and policy. She is passionate about re-imagining and rebuilding strong worker movements, including through a series of projects at the intersection of art, labor, and the conditions of artistic production. Imogen holds a Bachelor of Laws (Honours – First Class) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours – First Class), both from Monash University.

Consuelo Vargas is a Registered Nurse in Chicago and has spent most of her career working in the Emergency Department. As a member of National Nurses United, she worked with a team of Registered Nurses to plan and carry out a successful strike. This was historic because nurses had not gone on strike since the early 1970s and COVID brought about different challenges. Consuelo is taking a break from the bedside to recover from working in COVID and continue her education. During her sixteen-year career, she has also visited Peru and Guatemala doing medical missions.

Thursday, March 17, 7 pm EDT Guest speakers: Chiara Bottici and M. E. O’Brien Annex, Level C

Brooklyn Army Terminal, 80 58th St, Brooklyn, NY 11220

Chiara Bottici is a philosopher and writer. She is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies at The New School. She is the author of Imaginal Politics: Images beyond Imagination and The Imaginary (Columbia University Press, 2014), A Philosophy of Political Myth (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Men and States (Palgrave, 2009). With Benoit Challand, she also co-authored Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory, Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations (Routledge, 2010). She also co-edited the collections of essays The Politics of Imagination (Routledge, 2011, with Benoit Challand), The Anarchist Turn (Pluto 2013, with Simon Critchley and Jacob Blumenfeld), and Feminism, Capitalism and Critique (Palgrave 2017, with Banu Bargu).

M.E. O’Brien writes at the intersection of communist theory, trans liberation, LGBTQ social-movement studies, and feminism. Her co-authored speculative novel, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, will be published by Common Notions in July 2022. She co-edits two magazines, Pinko, a Magazine of Gay Communism, and Parapraxis, a new publication of psychoanalytic theory. She has published articles on family abolition for Endnotes, Homintern, and Pinko.  Previously, she coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project and worked in HIV and AIDS activism. She completed a Ph.D. at NYU, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City LGBTQ social movements. You can support her writing through patreon.com/meobrien, and find her on twitter @genderhorizon.