terra-collar work: Introduction
digital platform, video essay and public educational events, 2021
terra-collar work is a multidisciplinary endeavor that shifts the climate change discussion to work. It analyses the role that the infrastructure of work—places, actors, and technologies—has played in ecosystems’ drastic transformations and pictures a transition to the future of work which responds to mitigation and adaptation goals. Drawing on projects and initiatives, ranging from state-run policy proposals to grassroots and community-based actions, it proposes scenarios for the transition, emphasizing the urgency to redesign work to keep the Earth a habitable space for people.
terra-collar work argues that such a transition will require more work efforts, not less. Thus, it interrogates the future of work imaginaries that advocate for global workload reductions, nonwork time increase and access to granted basic income, healthcare and other facilities. It also engages with IPCC reports, Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and other climate assessments, with a critical eye towards their analytical tools. It operates at the intersection of economics, design, environmentalism, and infrastructure studies and proposes six operative parameters—scale, distribution, repurposement, training, sensing, and assurance—to illustrate how the transition to a rescaled, situated, and authenticated work infrastructure can be enacted.
Residing in a digital platform, video essay, and public events, the project articulates across different mediums to instigate actions with tools at our disposal.