ROTTERDAM.- From the micro to the macro, this exhibition explores playful and speculative avenues for critical reflection on notions of labour and the city. It also evokes an impression of artistic production in the urban environment. From the disappearance of the typical harbour worker to the artist's struggle to generate relevant works, this exhibition proposes a series of open questions on the contemporary condition of labour. The exhibition is curated by Manuel Segade (ES, based in Rotterdam), in collaboration with artistic director Mariette Dölle and curator Jesse van Oosten at TENT.

Mercedes Azpilicueta (AR) presents a new performative video installation focusing on the social soundscape of the city of Rotterdam. Taking as a starting point the performance practices of Futurist avant-garde artist Valentine de Saint-Point, she uses speech as a medium to reveal how social, economic and political identities are constructed in everyday language. Azpilicueta will transform her performance work into a video-based piece designed for the space of TENT.

Doris Denekamp and Geert van Mil (NL) collaborate as Informal Strategies. Their installation takes as its starting point the herbarium of the revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg. Alongside her political activities she was also an avid collector of plants, even when in prison. By making walks to collect plants around Amazon's Leipzig distribution centre, the artists contrast Rosa Luxemburg's botanical walks to the routine of Amazon's shopfloor employees.

Carme Nogueira (ES) presents her project Rotterdamweg (2009), consisting of ten A0 posters documenting twelve actions she carried out in the Rotterdam public space during a residency in Het Wilde Weten. The project focuses on understanding how the urban space is a fabric of micro-stories from the past. Nogueira inscribes them physically in the city, stressing the importance of telling them again and negotiating them with the passers-by as a way of constructing possible new maps. Rotterdamweg is the first of a series of research and performance projects about the transformation from industrial to post-industrial cities in Europe.

The personal and the political are always closely connected in Charlotte Schleiffert’s (NL) work. She gained international recognition with her expressive drawings and paintings featuring bright colours and impressive formats. In addition, Schleiffert has always made small-scale political drawings on topics such as intolerance, power, oppression, and poverty. In a collaged mural, she coalesces many of these drawings, creating a condensed retrospective that addresses global labour conditions.

Anna Maria Łuczak (PL) combines everyday objects with a video film in the assemblageinstallation Trust Speakers. The film combines visual and spoken observations on the PostFordist city with behind-the-scenes-footage of a report by Łuczak on Polish migrant workers in Steenbergen. After Poland entered the European Union, their numbers began to increase, especially during periods of seasonal work. The report was commissioned by a local TV station in order to introduce the seasonal workers to the inhabitants. A significant part of the recorded conversations conducted by Łuczak was discarded for the TV documentary.

The sculptures, drawings and videos of Fotini Gouseti (GR) often focus on the fear of the uncertain, the undefined, which, to her, gives birth to and sustains the ideology justifying a society. In between social anthropology and politics, Gouseti is working on a new project which will focus on the testing of air-raid sirens in the Netherlands, on the first Monday of every month, at noon. The sirens have not been used for a real alarm for over fifty years. Their maintenance and use will end in 2017, because of the costs and the lack of use.

In 2009, artist Marc Roig Blesa (ES) and graphic designer Rogier Delfos (NL) started publishing Werker Magazine, a socially engaged journal about labour and the societal role of photography. At TENT, Werker Magazine presents Young Worker's Camera: an ongoing project featuring over 500 archival images representing the relationship between youth and labour. As part of this project, Werker Magazine will organise workshops following the methodologies of the WorkerPhotography Movement, which emerged in 1920's Germany and then spread across Europe, USA, and Japan.

The Immaterial Material by Fran Meana (ES) looks into the mysterious reliefs that a quaint pedagogical programme left behind in Arnao, a small mining town in the north of Spain. Full of geometric motifs, the reliefs were designed in 1912 to introduce local workers and their children to the principles of geography, grammar and geometry. These reliefs constitute one of the few material traces of a new labour regime: the transition from an industrial to an information economy.