And we conclude (for now) this micro-section dedicated to the magazine(s) published by Documenta 12 by reviewing the contribution of the Viennese collective malmoe, who, overtaking everyone on the right, have published this article in which they dissect the economic conditions in which all the publications invited by the exhibition to participate in this editorial experiment have worked. The article is not to be missed and it is better that you read it in its entirety and judge for yourselves, but one of the passages that has most caught our attention is when it says that the guides of the Documenta’s pedagogical service have managed, through collective mobilization, to improve their salary conditions. Here we see how a collective whose work is considered of lesser intellectual value within cultural production (a consideration that should not be so, not at all, although for it to change it would be necessary to restructure from top to bottom the way in which the ‘pedagogical services’ of an exhibition are understood) is able to claim and achieve labor improvements, while the editors and writers of the publications that collaborate with Documenta, that is to say, those who carry out intellectual work in the strict sense, renounce any claim for the prestige and the social and symbolic capital that their collaboration may bring them.
I insist that it is better to read the entire article. Something that also shocked us is finding the article reviewed by Martí Manen in the A-Desk blog. A few days ago Martí complained (here) bitterly about the state of abandonment in which cultural producers found themselves in times of “redefinition of the political landscape”, which makes us wonder… What is happening to Martí? Is he becoming radicalized…?