PEASANT CV

2015

Sector Primario, Group exhibition at MUSAC, León, Spain, 2015.

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This project borrows the language and formalisms of academia to draft a résumé for a couple of peasants from León.

The proposal consists of a text written in the style of a résumé of an academic or a professional working for an international development agency, an NGO, the UN or some other intergovernmental body, but what is actually being detailed here are the chores and labor of peasants and small farmers.

Among the various styles and formats for résumés proper to different jobs, the most descriptive and most pompous, sometimes bordering on outlandish, comes from this particular field.

For instance, an administrative post for one of these bodies is known as “knowledge officer” and the requirement for the post is stipulated as follows: “Generate robust evidence and know-how that is informed by a practical perspective acquired through hands-on work.”

The embellishment and abstraction in these texts is in itself a kind of self-marketing and propaganda, and so I have deliberately used this format and language to re-situate the labor of peasants which has been continuously undervalued and stigmatized, written off as obsolete, archaic and out of place or indeed as romantic, ideal and folkloric.

The purpose of this project is to describe real labor through the use of hyperbole.

The work takes the format of a block of text and a photograph on a rigid support, placing it somewhere between literary and sculptural production. Similarly to the way the text utilizes exaggeration as a means, the large size of the “paper” matches the grandiloquence.