Work, Body, Leisure. On architecture and automation

Join the editors and contributors for the London book launch of Work, Body, Leisure. The publication explores the spatial configurations, living conditions, and notions of the human body engendered by disruptive changes in labor, its ethos, and its conditions. Published in conjunction with the Dutch Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of   Biennale di Venezia, the essays contained in this volume reflect upon urban developments in which automated labor and leisure converge; address the ways in which evolving notions of labor have categorized and defined bodies at particular moments in time; and discuss the legal, cultural, and technical infrastructures that enable their exploitation.

Work, Body, Leisure seeks to foster new forms of creativity and responsibility within the architectural field in response to emerging technologies of automation. A domain of research and innovation that, despite its ongoing transformation of the built environment and bodies that inhabit it, is still largely devoid of a critical spatial perspective.

Editors: Marina Otero Verzier and Nick Axel
With contributions by Amal Alhaag, AMO, Pier Vittorio Aureli & Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, Jonathan Beller, Beatriz Colomina, Silvia Federici, Ayesha Hameed, Femke Herregraven, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Markus Krajewski, Egbert Alejandro Martina, Francesco Marullo, Victor Muñoz Sanz, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Simone C. Niquille, Henk Ovink, Paul B. Preciado, Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, Ekim Tan, Nathalie de Vries, Mark Wigley, Annemarie de Wildt, Marina van Zuylen. 
Published by Het Nieuwe Instituut and Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH

Nick Axel is an architect, theorist and editor based in Amsterdam. He is currently Deputy Editor of e-flux architecture. Previously, he was Managing Editor of Volume magazine (#44– 49), Researcher at Forensic Architecture, and Resident at DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency). Nick studied at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, London, where he investigated the legal and spatial deregulation of hydraulic fracturing in the United States.

Marina Otero Verzier is a Rotterdam-based architect. She is Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut and curator of WORK, BODY, LEISURE, the Dutch Pavilion at the 16th Venice International Architecture Biennale in 2018. With the After Belonging Agency, Marina was Chief Curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016. Previously, she was based in New York, where she was Director of Global Network Programming at Columbia University / Studio-X, a global network of research laboratories for exploring the future of the built environment.

Image: Daria Scagliola