Internship - A Periphery

There is a place, at the periphery of the work market, where many of us are still held. It is a space that resembles that of the ‘sweat lodge’, the tent at the periphery of the village where teenage Lakota Native Americans used to spend a few weeks of sacrifice and purification before entering the adult age. This place is now called internship, and, like all peripheries, it is a grey limbo, a space of suspension, where the laws of the centre do not apply and the freedom of the terra incognita remains only as the memory of a mythical past.

Lost in this limbo in between worker’s and student’s lives, interns experience periphery as an existential condition. Their body, their names, their skills and emotions – everything in them must be emptied and filled again, in order to make them suitable to enter the promised land of adult civilisation

By its nature a place of transit between borders, this and every periphery is also a place of selection. Only a few will be allowed to pass beyond, while all the others will be pushed back to the suburbs that surround the walls. And here, at the periphery of the work market, like at any other border, there is a custom too, and a passport control. Class, Race, Gender and Citizenship: these modern Four Horsemen are the guards at the gates to the work market. Their selection is silent – better, unspoken – but its results are loud and clear. Take the cultural industries, for example: only those who can afford to spend long enough in the periphery will gain their pass to the golden land of cultural production. Unsurprisingly, such people are also those who hold the right currency to bribe the four guardians at the gates. All the others, those who didn’t tick the right boxes or lacked of adequate supplies to survive long enough in the limbo, will be destined forever to the digestive role of the cultural consumer.

And yet, not all of those who have been rejected surrender to their fate of blind cultural bulimia. Some of them camp for a while along the walls of the periphery, gathering together, sharing their angry joy, talking of oasis in the desert that surrounds them. They are those who had been rejected and decided to turn their unsuitability to the work market into a mark of freedom. They are those who won’t spend too long around the periphery and the walls that protect it. One day, as if overnight, they will suddenly decide to disappear. We will hear of them only years later, in confused stories about splendid towns built in the desert, autonomous zones hidden by the palms, or pirate utopias sailing across the sand.

One could only hope that they will never come back here, to the grey land of the Four Horseman, but that they will keep sailing, further and further away, feeding the dreams of those who are still stuck in the periphery, waiting for their life to be emptied and then filled again.

Federico Campagna

1-8-2009, London