Anke Strüver
Visibilities and Invisibilities of
Labor in Urban Space

As part of the exhibition Viscous City by Evelyn Plaschg, urban geographer Anke Strüver will give a lecture that explores how labor is made visible — or remains invisible — in urban space. Her approach is inherently spatial and one that politicizes embodiment: Who moves through the city, and how? Which everyday practices structure urban space, and which ones disappear from public view?

The starting point of her talk is the thesis that the neoliberal reorganization of cities — from the commercialization of public space to the digitalization of services — has led to a profound shift in what is made visible. While the design of urban environments is increasingly geared toward consumption, efficiency, and representation, the embodied labor that supports these spaces often goes unnoticed. Cleaning and domestic work, food delivery, or care work in informal contexts: all these activities tend to be pushed to the margins — spatially, socially, and symbolically — despite being essential to urban life and the reproduction of the social fabric.

Anke Strüver’s research focuses on the micro-levels of urban life — on how people navigate everyday challenges related to mobility, nutrition, care, or health. A particular emphasis lies on the human body in space: Which paths are taken? What practices unfold along which infrastructures? And how do digital technologies impact the conditions of urban living?

Especially in dialogue with Evelyn Plaschg’s painterly engagement with urban atmospheres, digital mediality, and subjective perception, a broader picture of the present emerges: While Plaschg’s paintings understand the surfaces of modern cities as affective spaces — dense, diffuse, at times alienating — Strüver’s lecture draws attention to the underlying structures. To those activities that do not enter the center of aesthetic representation, but instead take place in the shadow of the facades — in the unspectacular rhythm of everyday life.

In doing so, this contribution opens up a central dimension of the exhibition: the relationship between visibility, embodiment, and the city. How can labor be made visible without being instrumentalized? And which spatial conditions foster collective life — beyond the doctrines of neoliberal efficiency?