Doing Nothing Lab

Doing Nothing Lab is an ongoing artistic investigation examining the social, emotional, and political structures surrounding work, productivity, rest, and non-productivity within contemporary life.

Developed across performances, workshops, publications, collective exercises, installations, sleep situations, conversations, and temporary communities, the project approaches “doing nothing” not as passivity, but as a space of resistance, imagination, suspension, and re-negotiation of value.

The laboratory emerged from a growing interest in the contradictions of labour-centred societies and the increasing difficulty of inhabiting time outside systems of productivity and acceleration. Through collective and performative methodologies, the research explores alternative temporalities connected to idleness, celebration, waiting, exhaustion, disappearance, refusal, leisure, and sleep.

Rather than proposing a fixed political program, the laboratory functions as an open framework in which participants, collaborators, and audiences collectively test forms of unlearning productivity and imagining other modes of existence.

Across the different manifestations of the project, hosting becomes a central artistic methodology: workshops, gatherings, collective readings, phone calls, public situations, and performative exercises create temporary spaces where slowness, vulnerability, and non-efficiency can be collectively experienced.

PROJECTS AND OUTCOMES

Laboratorio del No Hacer

A collective and performative research framework developed through workshops, public situations, conversations, and temporary communities exploring alternative relations to productivity, time, and social value.

El FER i el no fer

A research project developed through interviews with people connected to the art world, translated into a five-chapter audio podcast, a written score, weekly collective performances of doing nothing, and a photographic series documenting suspended economic activity.

Do Nothing Every Day

A daily performative exercise consisting of one hour of purposeless non-activity every day during 30 days, through a shared blog containing texts, images, and traces of each daily action.

Nothing Left But Deep Sleep

A local Spanish landline number and a classified advertisement published under “Services” in a local newspaper, giving public access to two lullabies written, performed, and recorded as a collective gesture of rest, exhaustion, and care.

Manifesto

A written manifesto proposing “doing nothing” as a collective and political gesture, distributed as a textual intervention and public statement within the broader research framework of the laboratory.

I Would Prefer Not To

A performative action inspired by Herman Melville’s Bartleby, developed through gestures of refusal, non-participation, and deliberate inactivity within everyday productive situations.

Wasting time or how to levitate

A public performative action exploring apparently useless activities, suspended time, and purposeless presence through simple gestures of waiting, drifting, and non-efficiency in urban space.

The Do Nothing Way

A performative disappearance piece developed through temporary withdrawals from social visibility and translated into a photographic series documenting absent bodies, emptied spaces, and traces of interrupted presence.

Forms

The ongoing project unfolds through performances, collective exercises, interviews, podcasts, manifestos, phone interventions, photographic series, installations, public actions, scores, blogs, sleep situations, and temporary communities.

Rather than producing stable artworks, the research develops through evolving situations and experimental formats that collectively investigate exhaustion, productivity, refusal, waiting, rest, and alternative experiences of time.

Context

Developed over several years through collaborations with artists, curators, cultural spaces, and temporary communities, Doing Nothing Lab occupies a central position within the artist’s transition towards collective, performative, and socially engaged methodologies.

The research unfolded across workshops, self-organised contexts, artistic residencies, public interventions, pedagogical situations, and collaborative processes, progressively transforming “doing nothing” from an individual gesture into a collective and political field of experimentation.

Credits

Concept and direction: Christina Schultz

Developed in collaboration with multiple artists, curators, participants, and temporary communities across the different manifestations of the laboratory.