Leisure/Labor a non-film film
Leisure/Labor
a non-film film by Artur Silva
My research-based art practice tracks the global circulation of cultural artifacts, plants, and people to examine the enduring dynamics of imperial history and its environmental and cultural legacies. This focus underpins my new video project, Leisure/Labor.
Leisure/Labor extends my ongoing photographic series, Day Shift/Night Shift, which investigates the persistence of labor and survival within various landscapes and cycles of time. This new video work documents the intensely dense Blocos de Carnaval of Rio de Janeiro, where the entire visual field is saturated with people. Created as a single, unbroken 8 minute shot, the video is a direct meditation on the disputed space where collective joy and economic necessity intersect. It was shot from my studio window.
A festival of transdisciplinary art, by its very presence in public space, is a form of resistance. But this resistance is powered by a large network of labor. Carnaval is a mesmerizing, spontaneous eruption of collective freedom that thrives on its body-to-body density. Here, leisure and labor are not successive events but simultaneous activities, disputing every inch of the asphalt. The street vendors are not peripheral; they are the essential infrastructure of the event itself, performing the work of survival at the very heart of the festivities. Their effort is an expression of entrepreneurial necessity that facilitates the community’s collective liberation. In 2024, 39% of the working population in Brazil were informal workers such as street vendors.
In the aftermath of creating this footage, I reflected on Joseph Beuys's 1972 performance, Sweeping Up. In that work, Beuys engaged in post-event remediation, transforming the physical remnants of a political demonstration into an act of social sculpture. This footage captures the exact opposite: not remediation, but real-time, embedded labor. Although they are both documentation of labor conditions, Beuys’s act was one of cleansing and closure, while Leisure/Labor reveals an on live negotiation between laborers and crowd, fractions of human drama descending across the screen.
In this context, cultural festivities are not an escape from economic reality but a vital part of it. The fusion of liberation and commerce creates an ongoing dynamic, a continuous give and take that shapes the eco-systems of collective joy.