The Black Pixel

Halfway between the performative conference and the autoethnographic account, The Black Pixel is a story about labor and hacking, where a black pixel was inserted into the retouching workflow of an abusive photo-editing company.

For a year and two months, I worked in prestigious photo retouching studio. My role was to retouch photographs, mainly of female models, for major fast-fashion brands. The retouching protocol was strict and the pace of work was frenetic. I retouched more than 1000 photographs a month, for a salary of around 1100 euros. In order to gain agency in the automatism, I decided to interfere in the retouching chain by adding a black pixel to the photographs. In this context, The Black Pixel embodied a silent and useless gesture of weariness and non-compliance. Even if I tried to keep track of my gestures and archive them, the pace of work made my own protocol dissolve and transformed my interventions into an anarchiving exercise.

The anarchive is an archive that subverts and challenges the normative and colonial structures of the traditional archive. It breaks with the traditional archive’s logic of accumulation, classification and control, questioning who archives, what is archived and why it is archived. The Black Pixel whether as exercise or as project, wonders what silent but effective forms of protest, non-compliance, reluctance, weariness or unwillingness exist in everyday life to challenge high performance? Is it possible to imagine an agency that produces moments of disruption and awareness?

This project forms part of the body of work I had a boss and I ate him. Artistic Identity in a neoliberal world, an investigation into the concepts of work and art work through feminist practices emerging from capitalist work environments. The narrative Black Pixel formed part of the thesis submitted to the Department of Lens-Based Media at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam in May 2024, with Kate Briggs as supervisor and Sabine Groenewegen as second reader.