Labour Garden

Emily Floyd
Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1972.
She lives and works in Sydney, Australia.

Not long after Emily Floyd earned her BFA degree in sculpture from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1999, her work began to receive worldwide exposure. Her work takes shape at the intersections where sculpture meets public space and design collides with social crisis. It embraces elements of expanded sculpture and a range of print media and typographic artifacts, including the poster and the manifesto. Floyd renegotiates the possibility of public address, critically engaging an increasingly diverse and unpredictable viewership in debate. The topics of that exchange range from such urgencies as labor conditions in a world where work has become increasingly immaterialized, the traumas of migration at a time when exile is the norm, and the imperative of self-organization as unprecedented and improvised forms of community emerge across the globe. Indeed, Floyd’s work gestures toward new forms of sociality, for which the artwork can serve both as provocation and as venue. Her project for the 56th Biennale di Venezia, Labour Garden, is an example of that theme. Its title pitches two opposites together: on the one hand it signals a space of exertion and effort, often under exploitative conditions, while on the other it marks a space of leisure, the earthly image of paradise, the hortus conclusus. Might the title incarnate a paradox?
Floyd’s Labour Garden is a social sculpture, a modular assemblage shaped in metal, its elements covered in bright automobile paint and spelling the words “CONCRETE LA BOUR.” These elements are closed on one side, open on the other, and can be arranged to form variable combinations of shelves, carrels, and seating areas. On the shelves, we find stacked a collection of books, pamphlets, journals, and PDFs documenting everyday life in the epoch of vampire capital. This library includes studies in the political economy of globalization, dossiers on labor law, inquiries into mobility and grassroots cosmopolitanism, reflections on precarity and immaterialized labor. The seeming paradox in the title Labour Garden might be resolved if we were to regard this work as the staging of a productive pause between theoretical preparation and activist commitment.