Nuno Ramalho

Producing the Unproductive

The unproductive emerges as the resilient category of a world more and more defined by and for production, not only of goods but of ideas, communications, permanent exchange; speculating on whatits capacities, implications and limits might be via the context of art itself a problematic form of production is the fundamental question of this thesis.

Producing the Unproductive is therefore a research that proposes to engage and play with notions of labor, work, production, value, circulation, and capital, as well as other elements orbiting these (for example, debates on material and immaterial productions).

It examines those concepts through the politics of exoteric and esoteric phenomena such as rationalism and mysticism, in order to critically study the presence of art in today’s world. Thus, focus is placed on ideas and materials relating the structuring and articulation of those elements with the frames of current neoliberalism and its critique.

The aim is not only to diagnose sites of disruption, suspension and crisis, but essentially to examine potentialities located within those concepts and their intersections. In other words, looking at the agencies of inactivating and decomissioning that Agamben alludes to, but perhaps more importantly to that which they propel; what does the unproductive produce?