Efrén Álvarez

Efrén Álvarez. Económicos. From 2 February to 30 May 2011

Efrén Álvarez, artist: The exhibition Económicos is a collection of homemade experiments on the technique of diagrams, to construct a tragic tale about social relations in work and the economy. The diagram is a historical technique, a graph where some aspects of reality disappear and others are synthesised. Questions of magnitude like distance disappear. They only present the relations between elements and somewhat representative icons. I’m hopeful about the new technique of the diagram applied to social materials using emerging statistics.

In some cases, this application is smaller than the Internet, but it is an emerging technology and this part of the exhibition promotes this technology. These diagrams present the structure of work. One of the questions that interested me was to present work within a particular informative and legal structure.

The contractual structure of a company is well represented, as is the information structure that is produced as an intersecting twin between different things from legal and cultural networks. In social conditions, it attempts to represent the difference in information for a person participating in one of these contractual structures and someone who is an active and creative part of the same system with different decision-making capacities and opportunities. This is a little dangerous and some people may not like seeing a worker compared to a slave. One common aspect between these two ways of participating in the productive apparatus of society is presented. In both cases, the actors are dependent on knowledge they do not participate in.