Priscila Fernandes

Priscila Fernandes’ work has long questioned notions of play and leisure as opposed to concepts of labor, work, and productivity. Leisure, according to Fernandes’ research, responds largely to the desires of particular societies to alleviate its frustrations, disappointments, and repressions. Art, on the other hand, operates on the edge between labor and play, where an artist’s job can be reading poetry, visiting a museum, or watching films. In the 20th Century, vacations and paid holidays were introduced to create an economy of leisure, integrating it into the machinery of productivity. To explore the paradoxes and contradictions found in free time and the ones observed between the job of the artist and the lazy or unproductive individual, in 2017 Fernandes started tracking the developments in recreational activities and registering their relation to art movements, associating, for example, the invention of the first inflatable swimming pools with the Anthropometric performances by Yves Klein.