I am here at Het Veem this evening for B’s surprise birthday party. B is a Dutch graphic designer as well as a tutor at my school. As I see people here, I recognise some familiar faces, people well known for their works, some I know through social media, friends of friends, and new faces. Soon I blend in with the crowd and there I meet O. He introduces himself as a freelance graphic designer from Tallinn, Estonia while I introduce myself as a graphic design student at KABK from Seoul, South Korea. We continue having a conversation and I find out he also works at the bookbindery in Gerrit Rietveld Academie and at the bar as side jobs. “I have to work at the bar to do graphic design,” he says. It is not a surprise for young artists and designers to be paying the rent by making home deliveries or babysitting. Many of us simply ignore or even reject the circumstances that determine our own story. In doing so we often create idealised personal stories to the pain of the financial reality that lies behind it. We claim to be independent artists, designers, authors, or entrepreneurs regardless of our income.

Precarity means being moved and therefore is a loss of control. A performance, The Living Museum by Alina Lupu, involves the performer walking through the Stedelijk museum wearing delivery equipment stripped of brand logos and colours that we can recognise, exploring the freelance and precarious conditions of working within the art world. Lupu used to work for a delivery company Deliveroo as a side-job, and she used the visuals to highlight the statue of the worker. While she walks through the museum, she stares at her phone, which guides her to somewhere. We do not know where she is going or what she is looking for. We can imagine she might search for an opportunity. Here, delivery people are everywhere in my neighbourhood Zeeheldenkwartier, where Thuisbezorgd centre is located. This is where deliver people get their delivery uniforms and equipment. Delivery equipment is visually so strong, we cannot take our eyes off them, but soon it will turn into the normal and, it will become invisible and we will not notice the cubic boxes anymore. We can see in her performance, she illustrates the pressures of the young artists and designers and their struggles from the demand of an “always on”⁽¹⁷⁾ mentality that forms the work environment today.

The sociologist, Pascal Gielen suggested in his essay the concept of ‘the artistic biotope’ as the essential structure in order to build a long-run artistic career and practice. I see this idea can be applied to designers and students as well. The artistic biotope reveals the truth: we can never do without the other. Designers in the cultural field prefer to boast of our independence from market and state. To embrace our personal freedom, any type of dedication such as having side-jobs will be shouldered. He suggests that an artist must have a balance between four spaces to maintain the career. The first destination is ‘the domestic space’, where artists are free from their obligations. Here artists can work and experiment at their own pace in peace, have their artistic efforts judged in confidence. Every once in a while, artists must return to this stop in order to continue the artistic career. We all need such an oasis of calm and confidence. ‘The peer space’ comes next, where the artist is challenged, where their visions are criticised and developed. Then ‘the market’ comes, probably not everyone enjoys this destination, where their ideas and works are judged, where they can convert their ideas and actions into money, which they can then use to recharge and continue their career. When we feel dizzy from the smell of money, the final destination comes ‘the public space’ where the artist enters public spheres. All platforms like museums, media, even portfolios are open for artists to proclaim their message and vision of the world to truly connect to a culture. As Gielen said, “getting stuck in any one place means to lose one’s autonomy as well as one’s artistic mobility.”⁽¹⁸⁾ We must stay mobile to be at all autonomous. But indeed, our autonomy is guaranteed collectively.