The bed has become the epicentre of post-industrial work, according to architecture historian and theorist Beatriz Colomina.
In the age of social media, a unique horizontal architecture is redefining and redistributing labour.
Room 902 of the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel was the site of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s famous Bed-In for Peace, held from 25 – 31 March, 1969. More Bed-Ins would follow, in which Lennon and Ono attacked the society of achievement: ‘Work is a relative word, you know. Work is pleasure’, Lennon argued. ‘I hate that kind of concept because it is ruining the whole society, that is; achievement and result… But that is all hypocrisy. They don’t have to have a result. They don’t have to achieve anything … They don’t have to work hard. Why do you have to work hard?’ Ono continued: ‘It’s an achievement to enjoy’.
By conceiving their honeymoon bed as a 24-hour day workspace where they would invite press and communicate with a global audience every day between 9am and 9pm, and spend the other hours trying to conceive a child, Ono and Lennon challenged the distinction between work and leisure. They anticipated the working bed of today – the scattered, pillowy office from which an ever larger dispersed army of hyperconnected people regularly work, assisted by an array of communication technologies and a growing digital infrastructure. The clear demarcation between work and leisure time – between domestic space and the space of the office or the factory – is no longer aprerequisite for a post-industrial society. And the bed, Colomina argues, as a site for new forms of digital intimacy, protest, work, production and reproduction, becomes a ‘fucktory’.
– From WORK, BODY, LEISURE (Dutch Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale / Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam)
During the Work Marathon, Beatriz Colomina held a Bed-In with Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, Mark Cousins, Alison Crawshaw, Eva Franch i Gilabert, Matthew Fuller, Amal Khalaf, Farshid Moussavi, Oscar Murillo, Marina Otero Verzier, Nina Power, Pedro Reyes, Territorial Agency, Troika, Katharine Vega, Eyal Weizman, Ines Weizman, and many more, all in the 2018 Serpentine Pavilion by Frida Escobedo
More on the Work Marathon: https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/work-marathon
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