Two Imaginations in Miniature of Labor

Walter Benjamin, Liliana Porter

Abstract

This article proposes approximations to the concept of labor based on artistic-literary works constructed with miniature objects. An excerpt from Walter Benjamin's childhood memories and two installations by the Argentine artist Liliana Porter were chosen as the analytical corpus. In these works, the experience of labor and workers is represented on a reduced scale. In this approach, the interest lies in investigating what comes into action in the act of imagining labor, particularly temporality and labor force, to consider the creative and collector's appropriation of miniature objects.