Reuse Case: Time and quality
A collection of organisations from different countries – some from Europe, some from the UK and some from Asia – are collaborating on a large cooperation project dedicated to collective practices and decentralisation of power with a focus on contemporary performing arts. They receive significant financial support from the European Union which directly situates the project within a specific socio-political agendas, namely notions of democracy and equity which have been vibrant topics in the public domain. At the start of the project, partners and participating artists take time to discuss the inequities in the notion of equal pay and they try to come up with more equitable yet feasible modalities of remunerating the artists for their work. They ask, what should be remunerated? Is time the sole basis of measuring input? Should all the artists be paid a set amount for each time unit (day, week...) they spend working in the project? But what about being remunerated for the quality of the contribution to the project rather than the quantity of it? If only the quantity is measured, doesn't the project perpetuate the neo-liberal capitalistic model of time is money? But then how can they measure the quality of input to the project? What is quality? According to which standards? Who decides?
Eventually, the collective of artists decides that all the artists will receive the same weekly honorarium for each week that the collective was “on”. Even if not all the artists would have physically been there, they would be awarded the same fee. The fee was flat, with no difference of age, country of residence, academic or otherwise qualifications or socio-economic status. If an artist was not able to physically attended any of the collective activities it had to be discussed with the whole collective and alternative forms of participation were discussed. The engagement, dedication and labour of proposing and eventually implementing the alternative forms of participation in the activities where the artist was not able to be physically present were deemed equally worthy of the weekly honorarium and thus, the artists could count of a certain income from the project with much less precarity than other such contexts.
This case was shared by Israel Aloni during a workshop with participants in New Performative Practice, Stockholm University of the Arts (September 2023)
