Rodrigo Valenzuela, New Works for a Post-Worker’s World, 2023

In New Works for a Post-Worker’s World, Valenzuela continues to deeply address the realities of working-class lives in the United States and the power structures to which they are subjected, already explored in his oeuvre.

The publication collects a new body of works of black-and-white images, scenes of machine-like contrivances meant to evoke labour and its afterlife, in dialogue with a visual essay made of archival images highlighting the power struggle between Americans and immigrants, workers and bosses, land and personal space.

Valenzuela’s mise-en-scènes are simultaneously of this world while also reaching towards the realms of science fiction and the surreal. These depopulated scenes are reminders of the fungible Amazon warehouse worker, the union employee displaced by Third World labour, and those replaced by automation and artificial intelligence.

The volume brings to mind a plentitude of historical pasts: the Machine Age, the period between the World Wars, and our contemporary capitalistic condition