(Author’s Note: I sometimes forget entirely about articles I’ve written, only to discover them a bit later to be completely surprised by them. This is such a piece, written for Line Magazine back in April. Here is an excerpt, and can be read in full at Line Magazine, or if you have a hard time finding it/reading it, it’s also up on Prairie Artsters)

Precocious and Precarious: The Future is Unstable (and it always will be, so deal with it)

By Amy Fung

Since arriving in Scotland from Canada as a visiting writer and curator one month ago, I have been introduced to quite a bit of talk on the subject of ‘precarisation’ and labour - specifically, the precarious labour of cultural workers.

There seems to be both a blind valorisation of precarity in the arts and a growing desire for revolution from the precariously dissatisfied. But the theoretical arguments and the day-to-day reality of precarity appear worlds apart.

Precarity, to clarify up front, refers to individuals employed through temporary, short-term contracts. While this was once a choice for workers, the choice is now being made for us as precarity becomes normalised within the current neo-liberalist era.

My own experience working as a full time freelance writer and curator is a dedicated life of never-ending cycles of hustling and networking, where there is no clear distinction between work and life, business and pleasure, or employers and audiences. I do not see myself as privileged or subjugated, as I simply do not fit into the system.

As a precarious cultural worker, my job, life and time is spent questioning and magnifying the fissures in the system, akin to identifying the inevitable cracks in a plaster wall. The job of the artist is to widen these in order to expose the problem before the crack is superficially patched up. And there are cracks everywhere, not just in the art world.

The precarious nature of cultural workers is not so much a devaluation of our skills, but a lack of understanding as to where the demand lies. We work in a field that demands mobility without stability, but inversely, our instability allows us the freedom to address a multitude of subjects.

The nature of most cultural workers is precarious, because few of the systems that offer stability will actually want to be accountable to so many stakeholders.

My current placement is unique in that they believe in a 50/50 approach between the organisation and the town, and that’s how they’ve been functioning since they began as a self-organised arts group with a strong focus on socially-engaged art practices. I am also only here for a fixed span of time, which is also an important factor, because once precarity becomes routinised, as is the case across artist run centres, the working conditions take on restrictive parameters, and suddenly, cultural workers are still without stable incomes or pensions, but find themselves working 60 hours a week for meagre wages on an indefinite amount of time.

For another generation of cultural workers who find themselves painted into a corner, there is a palpable anger and frustration towards the system that has subsumed and regulated our precarity, making us active, although weak and willing participants in the very economic labour system we are supposed to challenge through our ideals and our actions. More likely, we are reinforcing the power of those systems when we let ourselves be bound by them …