Morning. I make us coffee while you answer your emails. Hurry up, I like to get there 15 min earlier, to chat with the team, to start the day in a good mood.

We’re building walls again — white and black boxes. They’ll stand for four to five weeks.
Then we come back to take them down.
We move together for several weeks, carrying the boards, making the frames, lifting and screwing the panels. Plastering, sanding, and painting — two times each. Measuring, drilling, hanging. Building benches and pedestals. A bit to the left, or 3 cm up. Taking it away. Hiding the cables, bringing the lights up. Retouching, making it clean and smooth.
You’d call it choreography. I call it a job.

I paint the walls, high up the scaffold, stretching my body. I feel strong and powerful.
You’re already somewhere else — thinking how this satisfaction comes to me because I still enjoy proving myself in this space as a woman. I just like doing a good job. You keep being slow and vulnerable, but I can’t afford that kind of privilege.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote that maintenance is to “keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight.”
I’m here to dust.

You would like to write about it. But my wrist hurts, my elbow clicks. The dust itches my eyes. Make some notes, if you have to.
         – moving through spaces that want to erase us.

I scroll a bit on the phone, and we fall asleep.
I dreamt of the day that just passed by. I am painting walls, it feels exactly the same. I think it is meditative. You think that is a bit sad, but in your dream, you had an argument with your mother.

Sunday. You spent it in a library, catching up with deadlines. We take our bike and go through the park. The sun is strong. It smells of burnt meat. A barbecue on Sunday is supposed to be a sign of “the good life”. But they don’t look happy; it feels like something has been lost or postponed. Their tired and exhausted bodies make them see through the thick layer of the present that holds the illusion that what we have now is the only possible. The capitalist promise of a “better life” does not work – it is selective, exclusive, and unattainable for many. Sunday is a day of rest, a day for family, a day when tired bodies show themselves to the sun, soaked in beer and soda.
I buy a beer and sit on the bench next to it, placing myself inside this picture you described.

Sometimes, I try to tell the others that there’s another me in my head — one who’s watching me while I work. But then I stop myself. “It’s just a job.”
“It’s not just a job. It’s a system. A scene. A symptom.”— you whisper in the back. You are soooo annoying!

You know, it’s funny — when people ask what I do, I never know which one of us should answer.
I make sure the bills are paid. But what you do keeps us together.

You want to collapse that distinction — I can feel it. You want the technician to be visible, the artist to be implicated.

Sometimes I hear you in the rhythm of the drill — whirrr — write about this — whirrr — don’t forget what it feels like — whirrr — turn it into something.
You don’t allow me to be happy where I am.

You remind me that artistic work is work. I try to be funny: “The kind that looks like nothing is happening.” It produces blisters, concepts, traces. It moves through reading, through people, through waiting. It stains your clothes and your cv. It demands precision, attention, and care — the same principles that hold the wall upright.
I know this, as I am your insider. I witness that the myth of the genius artist keeps on persisting in these clean spaces — their coldness is mistaken for clarity, rudeness for depth, cruelty for courage.

We agree that to handle art is to live in contradiction. We maintain systems we wish to dismantle. We love a field that consumes us.

Your father asked you some years ago, “Why do you keep doing this?”
I winced, waiting for your answer. But you said nothing. I just felt a shiver in my chest.

I know you’re trying to build something — a theory, a story, a self that holds both of us.
You once said to me “You know the work better than I do.” But I think what you meant is:
You know the work before it becomes itself. That is where you want us to meet.

And we met there recently. We were setting up Ghisleine’s exhibition. We read her book that worked its magic, as if giving us the permission to recognise ourselves as part of the work. It felt like our presence was acknowledged and acknowledgement changed the air. For a moment, the system of (self)exploitation that we had internalized felt changeable. A kind of performance of solidarity took place by our very presence in the exhibition space.

One of the scores that made the exhibition was the Maintenance Score. It reads: “The exhibition space is left as it is.”
But when is it left? Left after what? How much is left? And for whom is this decision visible? These questions of responsibility and control were not hidden from us, but we saw them materializing through negotiation.

      – the exhibition space is, at one moment, left as it is.

Another one: “The exhibition budget is displayed.”
We saw it plainly — the technician’s fee almost double the artist’s. It was there in black and white, a revelation: to make a living, one would need twelve institutional solo exhibitions a year! And still that would be considered below average salary in Germany.
Of course, this minimal artist fee doesn’t pay for the work an artist puts into making an exhibition — not really. The market excuses itself through speculation: the idea that one day the artist might sell something, that this potential profit justifies not paying for the labor now. But, no one is to be fooled — those rare ones who sell, they still have to work around their work. Something we already knew, just became so obvious: when you are an artist, you can’t expect that doing your job will take care of all aspects of your life.
The same goes, I guess, when you are a mother.
The work overflows its frame.

      – “Art is a huge psychological risk. It’s hard to take that risk without support.” 

Marina Vishmidt wrote that we must eliminate the opposition between novelty and maintenance. That maintenance can be a feminist politics of creativity — transformative repair. A resistance.
To handle art can be a process of becoming porous, of thinking-with, of holding space for others while refusing to disappear.

Sometimes we dream that the exhibition never opens. We keep building, unbuilding, repainting, erasing labels, rearranging lights. There is no deadline, no audience, nobody to claim the vision. Only us, handling art. Maintaining. Creating.
In praise of laziness — endless rehearsal without performance.

The dream leaves a residue of calm.

FOOTNOTES

Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s 1969 “Manifesto for Maintenance Art”. She writes about two basic systems: Development and Maintenance. Development is pure individual creation which is in contrast to Maintenance which keeps things going. “Development systems are partial feedback systems with major room for change. Maintenance systems are direct feedback systems with little room for alteration.”

 Lauren Berlant writes about “cruel optimism” — the attachment to something that promises a good life but also prevents it. The fantasy of comfort, stability, recognition makes that life immposible.