A Labor Theory of Artistic Value

Exploring the intersections between gendered reproductive labour that keeps the cultural space in motion, and the reproductive labour of motherhood, this collaborative performance combines video projection, a delivered text, and a performative act of cultural maintenance. This piece is written to be performed by a cultural worker, staff at the exhibiting organisation. This iteration of the performance will be performed by SAVVY member Raisa Galofre, herself a mother.

MARY JIRMANUS SABA is a geographer and artist who works across film, text,  performance and political organising to explore questions of labour, care and social movement in the Arab world and internationally. Mary is a member of the artist coop, ta3waniya / cooperative, a founder of the mutual aid Frantz Fanon Cultural Fund and a UC Presidential Postdoc in Film and Media at UC Santa Cruz. Her feature film debut A Feeling Greater Than Love won the FIPRESCI Critics Prize at the 2017 Berlinale Forum.  From 2006–2008, she co-produced the weekly broadcast television program Via Comunidad with Collective Vientos Del Sur in Ibarra, Ecuador.

RAISA GALOFRE is an interdisciplinary artist, photographer, cultural worker, researcher and mother working between Berlin and Barranquilla. In her work, Raisa moves across multiple languages, media and materials guided by the vibrations of counter-hegemonic embodied epistemologies, technologies and voices from Améfrica Ladina and the Caribbean, where she comes from. She works with their narrative, aesthetic, sonic and performative characteristics to craft stories that challenge canonical conceptions of being, time and memory and defy the rupture and objectification imposed by colonisation and reinforced by coloniality. Her staged, documentary, sculpture and performance based photographs, performance relics and sound works have been shown in various institutions and contexts, such as the 13th edition of the Bamako Encounters – African Biennale of Photography in Mali, the iihs in Bangalore, India, Vokaribe community radio in Barranquilla, the Fotogalerie Friedrichshain in Berlin, among others. Raisa is part of the SAVVY Contemporary team.