What a mess! The ears have crawled out of the gallery. Perhaps they could not bear to listen to the ever-echoing jargon of freelancers, artists, curators, and gallery visitors for one minute more. Inside the gallery, lighting oscillates like days between work and rest. Two lampposts are carrying their straw – fluorescent tubes coated with meagre provisions. Outside, the ears have taken on a new function. They are listening for the outcome of a social experiment; will they be allowed to remain hanging out for a month at the station in the suburb?

It is often argued that hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed more leisure than agrarian and later capitalist societies, working no more than two or three days per week. In Swedish folklore, it was important to hålla kväll—to “keep the evening”—to cease work before nightfall. The day belonged to humans; the night to the supernatural. To overstep this boundary was to disturb a cosmological order in which labor itself had limits. With the introduction of artificial lighting during the Industrial Revolution, work was severed from daylight. As agricultural workers became industrial laborers, the working day stretched to twelve or sixteen hours. Through workers’ struggles, hours were gradually reduced to the forty-hour week. At some point, some of the agricultural workers who turned into industrial laborers started working independently. Outside permanent employment structures, freelancers have been selling their labor as independent workers for centuries. However, freelancing accelerated in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries due to new, flexible labor markets and gig economies.