25th April 19h — Arts Santa Mònica
“Hardly Working” with Proyecto Una
Hardly Working
Total Refusal (Susanna Flock, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf)
2022, Austria, 20’ 30’’
Hardly Working is a piece by the Austrian collective Total Refusal, which focuses on the characters that usually remain in the background in video games: the NPCs. They are non-player characters who inhabit the digital world as extras to create a semblance of normality. A laundress, a stable boy, a sweeper and a carpenter are observed with ethnographic precision. They are Sisyphean machines, whose routines and patterns of activity, as well as errors and malfunctions, draw a vivid analogy of labour in the capitalist system.
Hardly Working prioritises those characters that normally disappear in the background of video games. These digital extras do not play a major role in the game’s story. Their work does not result in any product, nor does it change anything at all about the status quo. Their actions do not generate any social benefit, and are executed and imposed in the name of appearances, in order to ensure social order. It is at the moments when the algorithm of their existence shows inconsistencies that the NPC breaks the logic of total normality, shows itself to be flawed and becomes palpably human.
Talk with Proyecto UNA
After the screening we will have the presence of Proyecto UNA, a millennial collective whose mission is to unmask the new forms of fascism that hide under apparently inoffensive symbology, as well as to recognise and give value to feminist alliances forged in the heat of pixels. From what is popular and communal, they investigate the culture wars of power in the media, the internet and analogue reality. They are ready to laugh loudly from the barricade, because life is in their hands.
Proyecto UNA is a millennial collective whose mission is to unmask the new forms of fascism that hide under seemingly harmless symbology, as well as to recognise and give value to feminist alliances forged in the heat of pixels. From what is popular and communal, they investigate the culture wars of power in the media, the internet and analogue reality. They are ready to laugh loudly from the barricade, because their lives are in the balance.
Apart from their activity on the Internet, Proyecto UNA has published the book Leia, Rihanna & Trump: How feminism has transformed pop culture and how machismo reacts with terror (Descontrol, 2019).
