The Do Nothing Way
- Projects
- Performatic
- Video
- Collage
- 2016
A performance, a video, and fotographic work developed within Doing Nothing Lab, on labour, work, productivity, and refusal
The Do Nothing Way is a multidisciplinary project combining performance, lecture, video, and photography to reflect on the distinctions between labour and work, productivity and consumption, activity and refusal.
Drawing from Hannah Arendt’s distinction between “the labour of our body” and “the work of our hands,” the project approaches doing nothing not as passivity, but as a critical position from which to question contemporary systems of production and value.
Across its different forms, the work stages gestures of suspension, disappearance, repetition, and non-functionality, proposing inactivity and contemplation as possible responses to labour-centred social structures.
The project revolves around the recurring statement:
“I never want to work again.”
positioned ambiguously between political declaration, exhaustion, irony, and speculative desire.
Forms
Performance: two hired performers reading aloud excerpts from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition while resting in a white hammock beside a series of photographic works
Photographic series: nine photographic prints representing gestures that “do nothing,” exploring inactivity through minimal bodily actions and suspended movement
Video work: a moving-image piece structured around processes of disappearance, interruption, and dematerialisation
Lecture format: a performative reflection on labour, work, usefulness, and non-productivity
Together, these forms construct a contemplative environment oscillating between philosophical reflection, performative refusal, and visual suspension.
Context
Developed as one of the manifestations of Doing Nothing Lab, the project expands the research into labour, inactivity, and exhaustion through performative reading, delegated performance, and minimal bodily gestures.
The incorporation of Hannah Arendt’s writings situates the work within broader philosophical reflections on labour, production, and the political organisation of human activity.
Credits
Concept and direction: Christina Schultz
Performance collaboration: Valeria Linera and Juan David Gallindo
Back to main projectDoing Nothing Lab
Manos (Series of 9 prints)
The instalation with white hammock
Make disappear a glass and a performer.
Some sketches on dissapearing
Disguising former projects.
More works
Walls of Breath - from inside out
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Aixopluc
A performance about intimacy and safe spaces for women in prison within Walls of Breath, from inside out
Sheets of resistance
A project on female memory, belonging, and resistance during the Spanish Transition in Gràcia, Barcelona
Odyssey of objects
A project on movement, migration, and the circulation of objects as carriers of marginalised experience
Fer Forats
A transversal, collaborative writing project on La Rambla, Barcelona’s most emblematic yet increasingly gentrified public space
Rambla 14 - wandering fragments
A performance within Fer Forats, emerging from its writing processes in relation to La Rambla and its inhabitants
Conjuros y Colocones
A project on embodied knowledge, care, and alternative forms of mystic knowledge developed in collaboration with Metzineres
Oráculos de los Márgenes
Performative and material works within Conjuros y Colocones on rituals and circulation of mystic knowledge across marginalised practices
Anarcomistical Herstories
Performance within Conjuros y Colocones, translating its hosted encounters into a performative and narrative form
Utopian Almanack
A collective publication constructing speculative futures through situated knowledge and shared imagination
El Peso de mis Vecinas
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The Voices of my Neighbours
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Objects and Desires
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Tomatl - the red gold
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Doing Nothing Lab
A long-term artistic research platform on labour, exhaustion, slowness, time and other ways of inhabiting resistance
EL FER i el no fer
A performative and documentary research project developed within Doing Nothing Lab
Do Nothing Every Day
A daily performative exercise developed within Doing Nothing Lab, exploring non-action and alternative experiences of time
Nothing Left But Deep Sleep
A performative sound intervention on exhaustion, labour, and sleep developed within the Doing Nothing Lab
Laboratorio del No Hacer
A collective workshop based think tank and performative research environment developed within the Doing Nothing Lab
Manifesto
A textual declaration developed within Doing Nothing Lab, reclaiming non-productivity as a collective and political gesture
I would prefer not to
A telephone performance developed within Doing Nothing Lab, exploring fragmented narration through collective listening
Wasting time or how to levitate
A collective experiment developed within Doing Nothing Lab, on wasting time and collective levitation as speculative acts of resistance
The Do Nothing Way
A performance, a video, and fotographic work developed within Doing Nothing Lab, on labour, work, productivity, and refusal
Decision with no Return
A video and installation piece, an investigative detective story on the new relationship between England and Europe after Brexit
Perra Perdida
A performative guided tour on loss, disappearance, language and the activation of forgotten histories of communication, sexuality, and public life
Oooops, I have a plan
A performative and audiovisual work exploring how pop music and cinema shape political fantasies and collective imagination
Washing Machine Spin Dry Lead Acid Battery Kill Flywheel
A performative investigation into memory, belief, and the unstable construction of collective truth
Say hi to Tom!
A participatory collage project on tourism, exchange, and the circulation of personal narratives through the postal system
YOU your WALL and ME
A participatory site-specific collage project exploring hosting, intimacy, and the transformation of domestic and shared space
Who is she?
A performance exploring autobiographical projection, identity, and emotional transformation through performative animation
Limbic Trilogy
A cycle of audiovisual performances exploring desire, emotional projection, and sensory excess through real-time image-making
OMA OMA OMA
An animated documentary on work, intimacy, gender, and memory through autobiographical narration and hybrid animation techniques
PornoLoops
A video installation exploring repetition, desire, and the circulation of sexual imagery through looping moving images
Heroes
An installation project exploring self-construction through fictional heroes and emotional landscapes
Short fictions of Survival
A cycle of autobiographical stop-motion films exploring vulnerability, transformation, and emotional survival through handmade animation