Amateurs, Stars and Extras or The Labor of Love

At a remove from cinema’s and television’s alluring veneer, there exists an exploited class of worker—relegated to the margins or hidden behind the scenes. In Amateurs, Stars and Extras or the labor of love, Arsanios furnishes us with an inversion of this dynamic in which she casts ‘amateurs’ and ‘extras’ in the roles of central characters. And like them, a group of domestic workers, whose care-work is often rendered invisible, is also brought to the fore to become central to the project. In Amateurs, Stars and Extras , migrant workers—most of them women of colour—come to embody something beyond displacement or exploitation as subtle but no less trenchant forms of resisting the performance of labour are proffered. —Tendai John Mutambu