name: raquel / age: 35 / profession: photographer / location: Barcelona / weekday: monday / reference: My small kitchen is sweet
isolation
in an essay on free time, philosopher theodor adorno once wrote, not without a certain pride: “i have no hobbies”. for adorno, hobbies and leisure were only thinkable as the outside of capitalist labor time, that is, the outside that serves to sustain that labor time, in other words, leisure is mostly invested in the reproduction of labor power. (here a gap can be bridged with feminisms such as that of federici and others who assert that the reproductive labor women do in their supposed “leisure time” should be acknowledged and valued as work proper.) adorno writes about how several hobbies, such as sports, serve to subject workers more strictly to the disciplinary demands of capitalist labor. for himself, as an intellectual worker, adorno suggests that everything and nothing is work: reading, relaxing, listening to music. weirdly enough, many of us, intellectual as well as physical laborers, have now inherited this condition (without the elitism, but also without having much say about it). with the reorganization of work and time, the boundaries of work and leisure become increasingly blurred, and many of us indeed do not have any hobbies – this is the case for domestic workers, expected to be on call 24/7, as it is (despite the clear differences in class and often social economic conditions) for flex-working freelancers.