Finalist: June Lee
Parsons School of Design, 2020

Website: www.juneis.online
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/june-lee-a1493461/

In A Post-Work Renter’s Paradise productivity is for robots; children belong to themselves; to work is to reproduce; and everyone is a surrogate. In this post-capitalist world, productive labor has been automated, and the work left for humans to perform is solely reproductive. The social sphere is a stage for leisure and reproduction. Human labor is no longer about productivity, but about maintaining the social and physical infrastructures that have stalled with the dissolution of capitalism. Inspired by non-biological forms of kinship, the family as we know it is extinct, and everyone is a substitute for each other.

This fictional world is presented in the form of an audio-visual essay which narrates a time before and after full automation. At its core, this project is a critique of the asymmetrical relationship between ‘productive’, and ‘reproductive’ labor. Despite the necessity of this type of work for the survival of the human race, reproductive labor is often unpaid and under-valued. To me, a simple and provocative way of making this work visible to an audience – and promoting the fact that it is work – is to present a new form of social existence that is born with the full automation of productive labor.