BERGEN ASSEMBLY 2016
HUGO GLENDINNING AND ADRIAN HEATHFIELD: SPIRIT LABOUR

Film
2.9 – 1.10.2016
Hagerupsgården

Opening hours: (Tue-Sun) 11AM–5PM

Spirit Labour is a new film by Adrian Heathfield and Hugo Glendinning, which traces and connects some exemplary artistic figures of the late 20th and early 21st century, whose art practice escapes identitarian culture by being tuned to a set of barely visible, relational and dispersed activities. The film weaves critical and poetic observations on the nature and necessity of these artistic practices through a series of encounters with the artists and with thinkers working around questions of economy, faith, human ritual and ecology. Articulating the artists’ work as a form of what Heathfield calls ‘spirit labour’, the film acts as a powerful counter to notions of art as subservient to the spirit of capital. In so doing Spirit Labour traces a genealogy of creative practices inclined to elemental exposure and non-human forces, as renewals of the passage of humans toward their outsides.

At the core of Spirit Labour are questions such as: What kind of labour is it, to work communally with the bodies, movements, expressions and affects of others, to dedicate one’s lifework to the othering that issues from these relations? Is a life – especially a life spent making, learning, giving and transforming oneself with others – a kind of infrastructure? How might we better understand and value the social and artistic force of such practices?