In recent years, numerous initiatives have called for better remuneration for artists. The success of these campaigns is a testament to a salutary change in the status of the artist. For too long, this status was associated with a romantic vision of art as something practised out of passion, as opposed to a work that justifies remuneration. In this text, curator Julie Marmet, who is involved in favour of artists' rights with Visarte Genève, looks back at the genealogy of this movement, speculating on how the integration of artists into the world of workers redefines the very notion of work.

Two films by Lou Cohen explore the contemporary professional world with a wry sense of humour. From recruitment agencies to start-ups, Cohen imagines situations in which coaching and power relations combine and clash at the expense of workers.

Giulia Mensitieri conducted a field survey on the working conditions in fashion, demonstrating how the image of luxury masks and justifies the precarious reality of workers. In this in-depth interview, Aude Fellay and Emilie Meldem discuss their own criticism of the conflation they see in the book between fashion design and object advertising and, with Mesnitieri, attempt to co-construct a practice-embedded approach.

During her studies, Eva Meister took on a number of student jobs as her family could not afford to support her. In her TRANS – master’s thesis, Meister, now an alumna, looked back on these jobs and how they interacted with her artistic practice and her studies. Starting from an observation on precariousness and the risk of getting stuck in this triple status of worker, student, and artist, Meister considers how art allows for self-representation and thus for the objectification of working conditions and daily constraints. Here, we publish large excerpts from her Master’s thesis as well as some of her related drawings.

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt famously distinguished labour – linked to bodily activity and the reproduction of it – from work that transcends individual life. Through its physical and material aspects, painting is an activity that nonetheless covers the realities of labour, all the while offering independence from it by opening up a critical space. In this interview conducted in his Geneva studio, the painter Yoan Mudry talks about the practical issues and financial considerations related to his production process. Mudry also considers the possibility of commenting, through painting, on the Google-proposed standardised representations of life-at-work.

A graphic designer and teacher who has long been interested in interactivity issues, Etienne Mineur is experimenting with artificial intelligence image generation platforms, such as DALL-E or Midjourney, to create typography. Testing the limits of these tools – for example by asking AI for crustacean-shaped whipped cream lettering – he has managed to produce images that he deems inconceivable otherwise. In this interview, Mineur details his observations and speculates on the evolution of creative professions in the face of the automation of drawing.