Ricardo Sarmiento Ramírez with William Ruiz Morales & Gabriela Burdsall On Work

Ricardo Sarmiento with William Ruiz Morales, Gabriela Burdsall & Kiko Faxas at residency.


At LAKE Studios, we collaboratively developed the lecture performance “On Work.” The research-based piece became our way of navigating the question: What stories can we tell to escape, even for thirty minutes, the trauma of exploitation through wage labor? We developed narratives aiming to disrupt stories that validate oppression through romanticizing work.    


“A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny.” Paul Lafarge, The Right To Be Lazy, Saint Pélagie Prison, 1883.


During our residency, we also outlined a new project named La Circular to formalize collaboration among our group of Cuban performance-based artists living as migrants. The time and space in common allowed us to think beyond the production of the performance piece to imagine possible ways of organizing as an artists‘ collective.