Eternal Employment was chosen in 2017 as a public artwork for the train station Korsvägen in Gothenburg, Sweden. Our proposal is to employ a person at Korsvägen. And to finance this employment by investing the full production budget of the commission. The position holds no duties or responsibilities, other than that the employee is expected to check-in and check-out at the Korsvägen train station at the beginning and end of each working day. Whatever the employee chooses to do constitutes the work.

Korsvägen is located in the middle of Gotheburg’s enetertainment district, which is central for the rebranding of the city from an industrial workers’ city to an ”event city”. What Eternal Employment proposes for Korsvägen is an anti-performance of indefinite duration. A single person with no script, no climax, no crescendo. Forever.

The endless duration of this employment is feasible because money pays better than work. As long as we live in a society where the return on capital is substantially higher than the average increase in wages, Eternal Employment is kept afloat.

The station is to be inaugurated in 2026 and this is also when the employment will begin. A mock-up job announcement by poet Lina Ekdahl was part of the proposal.

You can find the full proposal on the website of the Public Art Agency

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Selected media coverage:

• P1 Sveriges Radio: ”Vems är konsten? Ett reportage om Evig anställning” by Mårten Arndtzén, Feb 13, 2018 (Swedish)
• Artnet: ”Two Swedish Artists Are Hiring One Lucky Person…” by Taylor Dafoe, March 6, 2019
• Washington Post: ”Swedish art project will pay you to do nothing…” by Antonia Noori Farzan, March 7, 2019
• CNN: ”Swedish art project will pay you to do whatever you want”, Michelle Lou & Saeed Ahmed, March 8, 2019