ALLEGRA PACHECO AND THE IMPACT OF THE LABOR ISSUE
There seems to be, and increasingly so, a constant and growing debate in the social sphere about labor relations and the impact of work on people. Almost absolute concepts in current narratives such as work-life balance or resilience lack the necessary background to create that conversation. However, in order to build precisely on them, the research being done on the impact and culture of work in this new revision that Postmodernity leads to value proposals such as the one Allegra Pacheco (San Jose, Costa Rica, 1986) lands in her conceptual Dear Salaryman, which in its latest evolution is exhibited at the Museo La Neomudéjar in Madrid.
Starting from the experience and personal impact of a cultural shock when she moved to Tokyo, the Costa Rican artist investigates in depth the cultural and social planes of the anthropology of work. If one pays attention to the Japanese imaginary of the exhausted worker, present in many social manifestations and almost integrated in the Western collective memory, one can understand that almost imperious need generated from that impact and that serves as a starting point for this production.
Despite the fact that the exhibition is trapped under the agglutinating concept of work and with clear aesthetic and objectual references to Japanese culture, the proposal of the artist intends to go beyond a specific location, encouraging the viewer to transfer the extreme that she observes with the local reality and thus question the personal reality of a global problem. In this way, Dear Salaryman facilitates through the exhibited works and videos that first step of approach, of delving, precisely, in the person as such and the function that the labor exerts on her and all of them being reference of the Japanese as extreme function.
See, for example, Salaryman Haiku, which develops the concept and the poem, confronted in its supposed beauty narcotized by the billing paper on which it is made in front of death chalk marks and a panel of photographs of everyday scenes that will be repeated as a wrapper in each of the rooms. Sometimes, that binder is of a sonorous character, like the Regain jingle that floods the room from its function in the sculptural installation Regain. Corporate Ladder and that incites without concealment and from an almost pop perspective to that debate, while at other times the references oscillate between the traditional and the usual, between that Sword and briefcase and Kimono to Newspaper, all of them with a side to look after in this research.
The final representation drawn in the viewer's head could be considered the key to this Dear Salaryman, chiseled with that diversity of techniques and conceptual approaches, and which becomes an almost innate response to the question posed. Although Pacheco's work can be seen exclusively from the academic and research point of view, the aesthetic part should not be left in the background, no matter how little or how much it contains of vehicular, because, deep down, it is also essential to trace that answer.
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Dear Salaryman, de Allegra Pacheco, en La Neomudéjar
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Dear Salaryman, de Allegra Pacheco, en La Neomudéjar
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Dear Salaryman, de Allegra Pacheco, en La Neomudéjar
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Dear Salaryman, de Allegra Pacheco, en La Neomudéjar
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Dear Salaryman, de Allegra Pacheco, en La Neomudéjar
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Dear Salaryman, de Allegra Pacheco, en La Neomudéjar
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Dear Salaryman, de Allegra Pacheco, en La Neomudéjar
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Dear Salaryman, de Allegra Pacheco, en La Neomudéjar
Dear Salaryman can be seen until November 10 at the Museo La Neomudéjar, Antonio Nebrija st., Madrid (Spain).
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