Noisy spirits shaking tools to declare that the cleaning service is structural work

A project by Julia Montilla. [contra]panorama

Julia Montilla. Esperits sorollosos agitant eines per reclamar que el servei de neteja és treball estructural, 2024. [contra]panorama. Foto Juande Jarillo

Visibility and invisibility are not just elements relating to sensitive perception. They are also processes that make up human existence; in fact, invisibility is a form of mutilation of this existence. François Vergés points out that one of the working bodies rendered invisible is that of cleaning and care workers, who clean the spaces where ‘clean people’ move, work or sleep. The owner of this body is a woman, usually a migrant and racialised, aged between forty and fifty, whose work is poorly paid, outsourced through public and private companies and considered unqualified. How can we force the conditions for these people – those who occupy a subaltern space in museums – to appear?

What can we do to show bodies that are not present? What if we use the reverse of invisibility, meaning the hallucinatory illusion based on seeing or hearing what is not there? What if we resort to spectres, spirits, magical creatures and ghosts? The ghost is an absence made present or the feeling of the presence of those who are not physically in a place. Making the ghost appear allows us to reveal what goes unnoticed.

Noisy Spirits Shaking Tools to Declare that the Cleaning Service is Structural Work explores this ghostliness through the use of two forms of spectral presence: noise, which comes from the workers’ voices and their repeated gestures during cleaning – a kind of ‘labourphony’ – and the movements of inanimate objects that disrupt the laws of physics, present in the cleaning tools, which act like otherworldly phenomena.

We come together with the machine or with anything else to make a machine, whose function is to machinate. The machination in Noisy Spirits Shaking Tools to Declare that the Cleaning Service is Structural Work refers both to the theatrical contraptions of a technical nature and to the ensnaring, manufacturing and conspiring among those involved in [contra]panorama. Instead of a confrontation between unequals, machination takes place through the creation of a cacophonous confusion that reterritorialises the sounds that ring out in the museum on a daily basis and the gestures repeated in the shadows.

The museum’s architecture, pre-existing elements and estructural and temporal divisions of which are used here, is another of the layers of this project. The public’s access to these ‘behind-the-scenes’ elements, hidden at first glance, generates interplay between the private and the public, between what is said and what is kept quiet, as well as what is machinated or dreamed up. In this ‘engine room’, the extracts narrated become one, so that the pieces and space work as one organism.

Text by Julia Montilla.

Artist

1 Artist

Julia Montilla

Barcelona, 1970

Images

3 images

Julia Montilla. Esperits sorollosos agitant eines per reclamar que el servei de neteja és treball estructural, 2024. [contra]panorama. Photo: Juande Jarillo

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In 2021, MACBA launched the triennial Panorama, which aimed to “deepen its collaboration and dialogue with local artists and cultural agents”. [contra]panorama, the second edition of Panorama retains the same aim but works towards it through a year-long series of interventions that take the project’s title literally, in order to question both the continuing relevance of the triennial (or biennial) format and its capacity to offer a panoramic image of the present.

exhibition

From October 24, 2024 to April 21, 2025

Noisy spirits shaking tools to declare that the cleaning service is structural work

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[contra]panorama