Zafra, R. (2020) ‘Precariedad y trabajo creativo’, in En riesgo. pp. 23–32.

Remedios Zafra presents creative labour as a contemporary mode of work shaped by vocation, digital connectivity, symbolic reward, and precarious material conditions. In this framework, creativity names a practice requiring imagination and autonomy, yet it also functions as a productive resource absorbed by capitalist culture. The creative worker appears as permanently available, emotionally invested, and continuously visible, carrying the self into each project, text, image, class, collaboration, or online gesture. Zafra’s argument develops through the tension between inner richness and material insecurity: creative work offers pleasure, identity, and recognition, while institutions and markets convert that attachment into unpaid tasks, delayed futures, and payment through prestige. The digital environment intensifies this process by multiplying fragmented duties: self-promotion, administration, networking, constant training, evaluation, and online presence. A specific case emerges in the figure of the connected creative worker operating from the home, studio, or screen, where professional time expands into rest, holidays, and personal life. This worker accepts visibility as compensation because authorship, reputation, and affective commitment attach the self to the work. The result is a precarious economy of enthusiasm, where vocation becomes a mechanism of subordination and creative freedom becomes vulnerable to exhaustion. Zafra’s contribution lies in showing that the future of creative work requires material justice, temporal depth, and collective resistance to the normalisation of permanent productivity.