Interviews with Artists
José García Oliva
-
Interview by Giulia Gregnanin
-
Published in July 2026
-
José García Oliva’s first solo exhibition in Scotland, As Long As It Yields, is presented at Timespan in Helmsdale. Developed through field research, workshops and conversations with seasonal workers across Scotland and England, the exhibition examines how racialised migrant labour is extracted through the UK Seasonal Worker visa route, and how responsibility for exploitation is dispersed across employers, sponsors, agencies, supermarkets, consumers and government frameworks.
Working across sculpture, drawing, sound, video and installation, Oliva attends to the infrastructures that organise contemporary agricultural labour: polytunnels, caravans, training videos, fragments of advertising and the languages of productivity. Rather than treating the countryside as scenery, the exhibition reads it as a working system shaped by dependency, temporary migration, extractive supply chains and the management of in/visibility.
The conversation that follows begins from the exhibition’s materials and encounters, and asks what can be shown, what must remain protected, and where responsibility is made to disappear.
-
I’d like to begin with the title. “Yield” measures output, but it also names a form of pressure: to bend, to give way, to relinquish ground. How did this double meaning shape the exhibition?
We are taught that to be productive is to be obedient. Anyone who went to a faith school knows this. Alan, one of the seasonal workers I met, put it in terms of punishment. Miss the daily target, and you lose hours the next day, less work, less money. Or you stay late, unpaid, until the target is met anyway. Performance is colour coded, green, yellow, red. Fall into red too often, he said, and "you might be sent back."
This kept coming up in the gatherings with seasonal workers, this link between punishment and expulsion. Many of the Central Asian workers were Muslim, the Bolivians mostly Catholics or Evangelicals, and somehow conversations were both arriving at the same religious architecture of Paradise, the forbidden fruit (from the forbidden tree in Islam), and the concept of expulsion, "sent back home." Similarly, in the US, seasonal workers, mainly Mexican, who pick strawberries call them "la fruta del diablo," the devil's fruit, pointing to theological scripture to make sense of it.
Yield sits between these two worlds, theology and agricultural labour. In agriculture it measures output per unit of land, a number that reduces soil, climate, and time into a fixed idea of value, feeding into expected profit and this ongoing drive to domesticate nature for human benefit. Paradise comes from the same desire for control. I read that the word is Persian in origin, meaning a walled garden, land enclosed for someone's benefit. But yield has another meaning. In religious language, to yield is to obey. These two meanings frame the work. The exhibition keeps returning to paradise, punishment, and expulsion as the structures that decide who gets to stay and who has to give way, cycling in and out each season to fill what gets called a 'local work shortage’.
Although, what looks like a shortage is really a lack of incentive, poor conditions, and low wages. I wouldn't call it a national labour shortage, it's a profitable choice in a post-Brexit Britain.
The exhibition looks at seasonal agricultural labour, but it also keeps returning to the countryside as idyll: escape, abundance, health, the good life. Lately reading the feminist author Sophie K. Rosa, I have been thinking about how the “good life” is often imagined as a privatised fantasy: comfort, nature, security, but for the individual or household rather than as a collective condition. How does this idea of rural idyll enter the exhibition?
It's an interesting site to take apart. There's a whole visual history behind the British countryside, wild, untouched, family land passed down for generations, a place you go to feel closer to nature. Ask someone to draw it right now, and I doubt the 43,000 migrant seasonal workers in UK horticulture would appear anywhere in the picture.
I wanted to challenge how we picture the rural landscape at all, this idea that it's natural, given, untouched by anyone's hand. It isn't. It's a cultural construction, and one of the oldest versions of that construction is the Garden of Eden, an image of abundance that's never actually free of ownership, or guilt, or who's allowed to stay. Every garden, even the ones that look ownerless, sits on a structure of who owns it and who works it. Sometimes that structure becomes the landscape entirely, polytunnels stretching for miles, industrial and total, and still somehow not what we picture when we imagine the countryside. We don't carry that image in our heads. Or we choose not to.
Philomena de Lima writes about this in her essay "Ticking the Ethnic Box." The rural has long been imagined as homogeneous, a "good place to live," an idea so embedded in popular culture that it shapes how rural life is actually perceived and lived. She points out that the countryside's imagined purity has often been defined against the city, its opposite, its pollution, and that pollution has historically meant the presence of visible minority communities. But these communities are in the rural areas, living and working there. They're just missing from the shared image we hold of those places. It's about letting them work, and making sure nobody sees it. Try it yourself, search "British strawberries" online. You won't find the Kazakh, Kenyan, or Bolivian hands that picked them. What you'll find is "proudly grown in the UK," "sweet and juicy."
You spent time visiting farms and speaking with seasonal workers across Scotland and England. Without asking you to summarise those conversations, was there something that stayed with you, or made the project click differently?
Completely, the biggest shift was realising a farm is never just a farm. You stand in one long enough, and you start seeing a condensed model of much larger systems, geopolitics, migration, colonial histories, environmental exhaustion, all compressed into one farm. The hierarchy becomes clear immediately. Landowners are British, often family businesses, with generations of inherited land. Supervisors are frequently Eastern European, workers who arrived before Brexit. And the people picking, come from Central Asia, East Africa, and Latin America.
One conversation that stayed with me, was when Maribel asked me, "What do you think exhausted land has in common with an exhausted body?" I gave the obvious answer, "They both need rest." She said, "If we were allowed to rest, I wouldn't be here working on this campaign." Then, "What we have in common is that, in order to keep us producing, we need to be medicated. Me, with medicine for back pain, and the land, with fertilisers, to make up for what it's lost.
That conversation shifted the exhibition away from thinking only about labour exploitation. It became equally about the management of exhaustion and endless land extraction. Neither the land nor the worker is allowed to recover. Both are maintained just enough to continue yielding.
Another thing that stayed with me was how present the idea of time became. It was about waiting. Waiting for the visa. Waiting for the season to begin. Waiting to return home. Then, once home, waiting to leave again. One worker said, "You start living two lives. Every six months you're waiting. Here, you wait to go back. There, you don't want to leave, but you count the days until you have to."
These ideas appear in the video work An Uncomfortable Beauty. It's filmed from both sides of the polytunnel walls, where plants are pressed against plastic, light filtering through, every so often a leg or an arm crosses the frame and is gone again. The camera never fully enters or leaves, it only looks through their plastic windows. Those structures hold their own artificial climate, sealed off from the landscape around them. I started thinking of them as a kind of third space, neither here nor there, the same suspension the workers were describing. The subtitles carry testimonies recorded in Russian, translated into English, laid over these images of light through plastic.
Many of the material elements in the exhibition come from inside the system you are studying: polythene, caravan plaques, training audio, worker drawings, agricultural structures, public signage. What is your relationship to materiality, and how do you decide when a material can carry the weight of the research?
I'm interested in letting material become evidence, rather than representing a subject, it is a product of that subject itself. Most of what's in the exhibition was already in use, in its original context, before it entered the museum. Taken out of its original purpose and altered, it lets me get closer to that tactility, and to imagine other realities the material might be holding inside it.
For example, the polythene used in some of the drawings is the same material that covers vast stretches of agricultural land, unrolled over steel frames for miles. It begins its life as a petrochemical, oil extracted from the earth and refined into a membrane thin enough to stretch across a field. It isn't built to last. It tears, is patched, and replaced every few seasons. Yet, while it remains in place, it traps heat beneath its surface, creating an artificial climate that allows strawberries to ripen months before their season.
It's also the material at hand on the farm. I like to work with what's already there. In this case, the polythene became the surface onto which I traced the caravan plaques at their original scale. Using it allowed the drawings to retain a physical connection to the place they came from, while linking the artificiality of the material to the manufactured images of paradise evoked by names such as Havana, Oasis Super, and Heritage Prime. The support and the image belong to systems that talk about leisure, abundance, and escape through constructed visual fictions.
I’d like to stay with the caravans. They carry this leftover language of leisure and escape, but in the exhibition they become evidence of dependency, exhaustion and temporary shelter. What did the caravan reveal to you?
One of the workers drew the floor plan of the caravan where they were living. While drawing it, they said, referring to the farm owners, "They talk about integration, but how can I feel at home when my house is on wheels?" That sentence stayed with me. Seasonal workers are expected to remain temporary, and so is the architecture that accommodates them. Both are designed to move on. What makes it almost surreal is that all of this happens inside a holiday caravan with a plaque on the door that says Retreat. Built to sell leisure and escape to British working-class families in the 1990s and early 2000s, many of these caravans became obsolete as low-cost flights transformed domestic holidays. Detached from their original promise, they found a second life on farms as accommodation for seasonal workers. Because accommodation is tied to employment, workers have little real choice over where they live. These caravans are usually situated in isolated rural areas, with rent deducted from wages and few alternatives nearby. Housing is not simply provided by the job; it becomes another mechanism through which workers remain tied to it.
In the audio-piece Becoming a Champion Picker, the training language is almost cheerful. It speaks of efficiency, safety, improvement and performance. What happens to that language when it is brought into the gallery?
The training video is grotesque both inside and outside the gallery. The difference is that, once looped in the exhibition, its optimism becomes almost unbearable. It's full of the language of corporate aspiration, cheerful music, motivational slogans, self-improvement, becoming a Champion Picker. It presents productivity as something achieved through individual effort, yet says nothing about piece-rate pay, recruitment debt, employer-dependent visas, or accommodation. The section called From Novice to Champion didn't need any editing. The script already carries its own irony.
I wanted the sound to greet visitors before they entered the exhibition. As you walk into the foyer, you're surrounded by the traced caravan plaques with their exoticised names of paradise, while this relentlessly upbeat training audio fills the space. On the opposite side of the wall sits a caravan staircase leading nowhere. Together they construct an invitation: a soundtrack encouraging you to climb, improve, become a Champion Picker, and a staircase that ends against a wall. In my mind, it became the snake whispering in the Garden of Eden.
The polytunnel appears as a kind of architecture, but also as a body, a corridor, a machine, perhaps even a trap. It also becomes the starting point for the central sculptural work, Paradise or Fountain of Life (White Snake), where an inverted polytunnel skeleton circulates a viscous liquid in a closed loop. How did this agricultural structure become a way to think about containment, productivity and extraction?
One of the seasonal workers called these structures "white snakes," their bodies elongated across whole fields. I started looking at the shape itself, the architecture of the thing. If you've ever seen a snake's skeleton, you'll know what I mean when I say the polytunnel, reversed, looks oddly similar. That became the starting point, opening the structure up, turning it over, and asking what it would mean to keep feeding an irrigation system through it. There's something unsettling about looking at what resembles the skeleton of a dead animal while viscous oil continues to circulate through it. Contemporary agriculture is often framed in terms of productivity, but what interested me was the infrastructure that makes that productivity possible, a continuous cycle of extraction, and replenishment, where quantity takes precedence over recovery.
That's where the snake oil comes in. What's pumping through the skeleton is a snake oil recipe, the same remedy sold in the nineteenth century as a cure for almost everything, despite curing anything. It later became synonymous with fraud and false promises. The liquid never reaches a destination. It simply loops back on itself, like an ouroboros feeding on its own tail. At the centre of the gallery, the sculpture also becomes an ornamental fountain, recalling the Fountain of Life. I wanted the same structure to be read as both irrigation and ornament, one sustaining production, and as a piece sustaining the image of paradise that goes across the exhibition.
Your previous works have often looked at the labour that institutions depend on but rarely centre, including outsourced cleaning, security and service work within the museum workforce. How does As Long As It Yields connect with that earlier research, and what changed when the focus moved from the museum to agricultural labour and the rural landscape?
We like to imagine museums, universities, and cultural institutions as spaces governed by values different from those of other industries. But increasingly they rely on the same outsourced labour, cleaners, security, front-of-house staff, and on managerial structures that reproduce familiar hierarchies of invisibility and extraction. Culture often presents itself as an exception to capitalism, while quietly depending on many of the same labour relations that sustain it.
What interested me wasn't simply outsourced labour itself, but the way outsourcing redistributes responsibility. Whether in museums, universities or agriculture, it allows institutions to benefit from people's labour while creating distance from the conditions under which that labour takes place. Accountability becomes fragmented, making it increasingly difficult to identify where responsibility lies. The façade work Everyone Blames the Weather came from a conversation with one of the seasonal workers, who described how the weather often became an explanation for everything: why they couldn't work, why they earned less, why things couldn't change. I became interested in that idea of attributing responsibility to something abstract, something no one can negotiate with. In different ways, outsourcing operates similarly. Responsibility is always displaced elsewhere. In that sense, the museum, the university, and the agricultural landscape aren't as different as they appear.
-
︎ @olivajosec
josegarciaoliva.com
︎ @timespan_helmsdale
timespan.org.uk
-
If you like this why not read our interview with David John Scarborough.
-
© YAC | Young Artists in Conversation ALL RIGHTS RESERVED