During a recent visit in Brazil, Myriam was taken by Cho’s exhibited artworks at the Palácio das Artes in Belo Horizonte, which made us want to include it in this issue. The following text, written by Cho, contextualizes his use of cash registers’ receipts to talk about labor, value, temporality, and affect.
During the two years I worked as a cashier in downtown São Paulo, various experiences printed the thin film of routine, creating unease toward the normalized reality of the workplace. Issuing hundreds of receipts during long shifts, serving difficult customers. It is ironic to realize that the person mediating the exchange between products and money simultaneously becomes the product of a monetary exchange.
Coming from an immigrant family, I believed that hard work would be the path toward the financial stability needed to give meaning to everyday life. For that reason, I devoted myself intensely to my job. On my days off, I was no one, just a body in maintenance for the next workday. The desire for upward movement dissolved in the urgency of the present: thinking about the future seemed futile.
A decade later, while in art school, a latent unease about the dynamics of labor and survival began to guide my artistic research toward thermal paper. I started creating my own receipts, printed with texts, codes, and images that arise from affective experiences, and contaminate the standardized format of this object, resulting in a different kind of receipt: a document that bears witness to human experience.