In 2000, Spanish Artist Santiago Sierra was invited to install a solo show at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. For Workers Who Cannot Be Paid, Remunerated to Remain Inside Cardboard Boxes, he recruited six asylum seekers from a local asylum seekers’ home who were willing to participate in his work by sitting inside cardboard boxes for four hours a day during the six-week period of the exhibition. Sierra had already worked with this concept twice before, in Guatemala City (1999) and in New York (2000). There the participants, mostly illegal workers or people with migration backgrounds, received a salary that was matched to the country's minimum wage. In Berlin, the situation was different. Here, the actors were considered as “workers who cannot be paid.” Due to their legal status and the restrictions of the German Asylum Law, they were not allowed to work – any violation of this law could eventually turn into a justification for deportation (Goerens 2003, 31). In order to remunerate them regardless, Sierra paid them “in secret,” as he noted on his internet page (Sierra, n.d.).

Employing people who are willing to “work” for very little money, undertake physically demanding actions, risk the socio-political conditions of their lives and enter precarious labor relations, has been a central strategy in Santiago Sierra's work since the late 1990s (Medina 2000; Sileo and Henke 2017). Yet, the artist presents the actors’ labor by means of a precariousness that most of today's critical theories have proven inadequate to address.