2025/10/02 by Carmen Sanchis-Sinisterra · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Posthumanist Ethics and Activism #Spanish Culture and Identity #Theatre and Performance Studies
paper · doi:10.1080/14636204.2025.2582894
openalex publication_date 2025/10/02 · openalex created_date 2025/12/08 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
This article examines contemporary Spanish artist Raquel Friera's “One Year Women's Performance 2015–2016” as an artistic intervention that challenges how capitalism consistently undervalues domestic and care labor. Friera's work, a feminist reinterpretation of Tehching Hsieh's durational performance piece, documents twelve women through punch cards, photographs and audio recordings. Through a feminist economic lens, I analyze how Friera deploys situated knowledge to make visible the hidden socioeconomic realities that sustain capitalist accumulation. The analysis positions Friera's work within dual contexts: a genealogy of Spanish women artists who have critically engaged with domestic labor since the 1970s, and the theoretical frameworks of feminist economists including Cristina Carrasco and Amaia Pérez-Orozco. By introducing a punch card system typically associated with waged labor, Friera categorizes domestic work as equivalent to the productive work that capitalism readily recognizes. This methodology connects to the critical archival tradition in contemporary art, creating an archive of the unrecorded. Friera's collective approach with participants from a local women's association embodies what Donna Haraway calls a situated network of knowledge production, challenging the positivist abstractions of mainstream economics through embodied experience. The resulting exhibition materializes J.K. Gibson-Graham's foundational concept of the economic iceberg, revealing the vast structure of unrecognized labor beneath visible market activities. The work illuminates key contradictions within capitalism identified by Nancy Fraser: between recognition and invisibility, individual agency and structural constraints, and capital accumulation and social reproduction. By documenting these tensions without resolving them, Friera creates what might be termed a “feminist visual economics” that demonstrates art's potential to generate alternative forms of economic knowledge grounded in women's everyday experiences.