TURIN.- Until January 16, 2022 OGR Torino presents Vogliamo tutto. An exhibition about labor: can we still want it all?, curated by Samuele Piazza with Nicola Ricciardi: a group exhibition on the transformation of labor in the post-industrial and digital era, between awareness and disillusion, precariousness and empowerment.

Inside OGR Torino, a symbolic site of transition towards new models of productivity, the installations, sculptures, videos, and performances of thirteen artists invite us to observe the remains of a recent industrial past and the ambivalence of new working conditions.

Vogliamo tutto takes its title from a novel by the artist and writer Nanni Balestrini, We Want Everything, published in 1971. The book recounts the sweltering autumn of 1969 in Turin, and the changes the Italian society underwent in those years. The exhibition investigates our contemporary condition, without proposing definitive solutions but inviting visitors to rethink their position in today’s working conditions.

Two discursive strands ideally cross the exhibition path. The works on display at Binario 1 focus on the transition from industrial to a post-industrial society, and on the need to re-imagine a future that takes on the material, social and environmental legacies of that model. These include Kevin Jerome Everson's video Century, which shows the demolition of a namesake car model, LaToya Ruby Frazier's social investigation The Last Cruze, which bears witness to the consequences of the closure of an automobile plant on the community of Lordstown, Ohio, and Mike Nelson's monumental installation The Asset Stripper, in which materials salvaged from abandoned industries seem like ghosts of a bygone era.

At Binario 2, the exhibition shifts to digital work and on how its advent has changed, radicalized or, in some cases, left some issues of the world of labor unchanged. As, for example, Technologies of Care by Elisa Giardina Papa, a collection of interviews with various online care workers, representatives of an invisible workforce, or the woodcuts prints titled The Manual Labor Series by Sidsel Meineche Hansen, which draw attention to the false ideology of the disappearance of physical labor. And again, the video installation In Real Life by Liz Magic Laser which, through a reality show format involving five gig-workers in search of a new life balance, reveals the blurred boundary between work and free time.

As in an invitation to awareness, to the search for new possibilities and alternatives to the current system, the exhibition closes with works that recall claims of the past: A Call to Arms: Building a Fem Army by Andrea Bowers, featuring three female figures in an ideal manifesto for the intersectional feminist struggle, and Vogliamo Tutto Brickbat by Claire Fontaine, in which the cover of the book of the same name by Balestrini wraps a brick symbol of protest and turmoil.

Vogliamo tutto was a maximalist and concise claim reflecting the aspirations of a working-class on strike against exploitation, and seeking better working conditions, fair wages, free time, and the right to an income unrelated to wage labor. Fifty years after its publication, it can be said that many of the issues raised in the book have changed without real resolution, only making it more complex to identify causes and ways of dealing with a new precarity in a global context.

In today's Western world - which is moving away from industrial production and from the idea of traditional workplace - how have the struggles and demands of the 1970s been reformed? How have labor and its deregulation within neoliberal dynamics affected the ability to fight for rights?

In a society where labor and leisure often no longer have distinctions, and where the Covid-19 pandemic adds even more challenges to everyday life, does it still make sense to want it all? 

Exhibition artists: Andrea Bowers, Pablo Bronstein, Claire Fontaine, Tyler Coburn, Jeremy Deller, Kevin Jerome Everson, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Elisa Giardina Papa, Liz Magic Laser, Adam Linder, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Mike Nelson, Charlotte Posenenske.