ADN Galeria presents Travaille contre le travail, an exhibition by Democracia. The project stems from an action carried out on May 1st, 2025, in Charleroi, where, through a public call, a rally against work was organized in collaboration with the British industrial music group Test Dept. The show delves into a political and artistic genealogy that links the emancipatory struggles of the working class with the avant-gardes that imagined the abolition of work as a horizon of freedom and creation.
The exhibition stems from a reflection on the centrality of labour in the construction of the modern subject and in the unfulfilled promises of progress. Throughout history, theorists and representatives of the working class have imagined emancipation not only as an improvement in working conditions but as the possibility of liberation from work itself. Or rather, from the “productivist mandate” that turns life into a function of the economy. From the socialist and anarchist doctrines of the nineteenth century — from Charles Fourier and William Morris to Karl Marx, Paul Lafargue and Piotr Kropotkin — emerged the idea that freedom did not lie in the right to work, but in its overcoming, in the recovery of time and desire as territories of autonomy.
