Text on Practice V1

Text on Practice (first draft) 23_03_2022

My recent project “To Each Their Own” is a short fiction film about people from the neighbourhood who are hustling in different ways to get by. The main character Nova and her best friend Oliver are meeting their ends day-to-day by different means online, other people in the neighbourhood rely on the gig economy, they drive Ubers, freelance for Delivery..

The characters are introduced through the point of view of the main character Nova, who is a confident gen-Z’er and sells her worn panties online. Nova knows who’s buying her panties and is willing to increase her sales in order to pay her rent. Her friend Oliver, the master of “side-gigs”, recommends her to be more efficient. And Mo, the Moroccan Uber driver slightly has a crush for Nova,.. All of the characters are believable, typical contemporary types: on the one hand highly educated and privileged to a degree, on the other lacking the opportunities to find long-term housing, income, stability, etc. Precarity is here the key term. The characters have big dreams, but obviously the results in the long run are quite sad.

My current work is the one of text and syntax. I am researching the informal economies, reading about street vendors and other precarious, mostly illegal occupations. For now, while yet searching for the research topic I stumble upon the idea of philosophizing the hustle: can we dematerialize it and even phoethisize it? Can we think of the informal worker as an employee of a viable system, where the government doesn't monitor their activities and the award isn’t always monetary? I am thinking about the mushroom pickers and the berry sellers. Next to it I want to think of the importance of labour carried out by caretakers and maintenance workers. Practises like motherhood and cleaning the house, doesn’t pay much, but are essential to our existence. How do we relate to that? I am embarrassed to admit that cleaning makes me happy. And our society and economy constantly promise us progress, in a Neo-liberal paradise, but what are the ideas of progress for the informal worker?

My current ideas are related to the short film, as both of them are talking about the modes of getting by and the precarious worker.
The short film is set in an era of the internet, the gigs and the hustle are held online, everyone is self employed and has the freedom of working whenever. All of the characters have a slight illusion that they can and will make a lot of money, but in reality they won’t, just like street vendors and mushroom pickers .

Big dreams mediocre results, Although, the mushroom picker might be able to survive without his costumers, as he can cook dinner with his stakes, while the Uber driver and others are more dependant on the company they work for and many other circumstances.



What do you want to do next?

I’d like my next project to be more of a documentary style (photography or film) For that I want to go on a field research where I could meet street vendors or other hustlers, see how they live, whats their daily routine like, but also analyze what kind of importances these hustles carry; how do their business interact with social structures and economy streams of the place. 

And for now before I go, I want to continue writing. I want to write little stories, maybe fictionalized scripts and make small try outs. For now I will need to narrow down my interest to a specific group of people, and for now I’d need someone to guide me through my writing (and probably cut the clutter). I need to figure out what is it exactly that I am talking about, and I can use various methods for that. 

I’ve some ideas for small try outs to write small fiction stories about the ‘street employees; write and film small scenes . For this I’d need to delve deeper into character development, conflict and other dramatic points of a storytelling practice. I think this would be a good exercise to start with before I go on a field trip. 
(for the field research if need some docu knowledge but we are getting a seminar on it soon)

Who’s in your neighbourhood? Inspiration on texts: Olga Ravn - The Employees, Anne Boyer. A friend of mine sent me loads of theory from her anthropology studies on informal economy and undocumented wokers, I still need to consume it.  Artists/Filmmakers: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Ken Loach , Alina Lupu, Bertien Van Manen.