#ten workers

Santiago Sierra, Burial of ten workers, 2010

The place is referred as the north periphery of Livorno with a strictly portal-industrial character. This context has historical references to portal trade, slavery, maritime industry and immigration, but also to social movements like the foundation of the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI). The workers, ten black men from Senegal, are strictly precarious workers enslaved by the merchandises of a faceless capitalism that they sell in the streets and beaches of Livorno: capitalism as supreme patron without a localized syndicate or working space-time. Santiago Sierra’s work paraphrases the monument raised in Livorno to honor Ferdinando I from the Medici Quatro Mori (The four Moors), where the aristocrat stands on top of the monuments base holding 4 enchained black men. For Sierra the martyred are 10 black Senegalese. In front of the sea looking towards the industrial area of Livorno and the sea, ten black men are paid to let their selves be buried gradually till the neck. Slaves of a volatilized patron set free by an absolute liberated hand-labor (more precisely an oral-labor due to the communicative approach to selling) that expands all over time and space. And it is precisely this overflow of capitalisms omnipresence that Santiago Sierra pulls down into a series of dual terms that articulate the conceptual and formal aspects of the artwork: capital-life, power-powerless, state-immigration, system- people, time-space, artwork-public, marginalized-the well- off, and so on. – © 2011, ProLitteris, Zurich