Marika Troili

Jag är / I am

‘I am’ involved a process in which the attempt to learn how to throw a plate on a potter’s wheel served as a backdrop for a more complex set of questions around emotional labor and how to perform a personality attractive to the labor market. As employees we are not only asked for formal qualifications, such as education or work experience, but are expected to perform certain emotional qualities, such as being flexible, positive, goal oriented, and a good team player, to give but a few examples. The work played with the possibility of being transformed into an attractive employee through a process of positive affirmation, -a subliminal reprogramming of the personality. While trying to learn a skill from scratch, to throw a plate on a potter’s wheel, I was continuously repeating to myself, as mantras, quotes from job ads which describe the sought for personal qualities of the employees. The hypnotic circular movement of the potter’s wheel, the focus on controlling my hands shaping the clay and the repetition of the advertised perfect employee profile were combined to function as a self transformation machine. The installation displays the material outcome of the learning process, the clay ‘plates’, along with small LED fans which are programmed with some quotes that I used in the attempt to transform my personality.

Sound used in the process (in Swedish) recorded with a readspeaker, 31:57 min.

Installation view Industrisemester, Maskinhuset i Grängesberg, 2016.

Installation view Prekär,
Arbetets Museum, 2015.