Work is in motion, and with it also the reality in which we live, the foundations on which we stand, our identity, our sense of self-worth and our self-assurance. Everything appears to be in motion, as if we were sitting on the back of a tiger, with no idea of where the journey is heading.
If the story of industry and labour filtered until now through the photographic medium, in this show videos will provide a visual representation. Through the filmed interpretation of reality, the eye of the video camera gives evidence of the mutability of a world – the world of work and production – that is undergoing rapid transformation, describing changes, evolutions and breaking points in a direct and engaging manner.
Harun Farocki / Antje Ehmann show ninety videos from fifteen different towns. For Labour in a Single Shot (2011-2014), they returned to the beginnings of film history. Inspired by one of the first motion pictures ever made – La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (1895), in which the Lumière brothers showed male and female workers leaving a factory, all in a single take – Farocki and Ehmann travelled to fifteen big cities and, in collaboration with local video artists and camera operators, produced over 400 short films on the theme of work. The movies show paid and unpaid, material and intangible, traditional and contemporary, industrial and pre-industrial types of work, always recorded in a single shot, from the dual perspective of individual actions in the midst of collective, social forces.
Yuri Ancarani deals with invisible work. In his three videos – Il Capo (2010), Da Vinci (2012), and Piattaforma Luna (2011) – he shows people undertaking highly delicate tasks. In the first video the chief of operations issues to his people precise and dangerous instructions through his sublime hand signals in the midst of the marble quarries of Carrara. Conducting his orchestra with elegant gestures against the backdrop of the sheer slopes and peaks of the Apuan Alps, he works in total noise, yet creating a paradoxical silence. In the second video a surgeon executes an operation by means of the Da Vinci System, occupying the space between body and machine. The third video shows deep-sea researchers in their underwater pod during their slow descent into the great depths. “I wanted to follow closely such an extreme profession,” says Ancarani. “For three days we lived under heavy pressure in the hyperbaric chamber together with the divers – they were the actors. We ate with them and slept next to them, breathing in helium at times and speaking like Duffy Duck, in a distorted tone of voice. It was truly intense, an experience that I hope I conveyed through the movie.” Ali Kazma’s research is focused on different forms of labour – manual work in the Alessi workshops (Household Goods Factory, 2008), repetitive tasks performed by office clerks (O.K., 2010), and highly technological production of cars in an Audi factory (Automobile Factory, 2012). Kazma and Ancarani are both deeply interested in the rhythm of labour, researching the “music” of work, of workers, and of their gestures.
The videos in the exhibition deal with the changes in the industrial world, wandering restlessly through and around increasingly empty factory plants, while elsewhere the hammering and hissing continues or production carries on silently, at great speed and with high precision. They also guide us through digitally controlled environments devoid of people, and in desert, abandoned factories that have fallen out of use. These works develop powerful images of different atmospheres in which work or negotiations take place, from the manual activities of an individual person to mass production, from human to robotic, from energy to high-tech production, from product development to contractual negotiations, from legal issues to structural, existential problems in the financial system and its forms of coexistence and cooperation.
In Empty (2006), Willie Doherty filmed an empty office building in Belfast. He moved around it with a camera shooting countless individual images, which were later turned into a film. We experience the building, with its flaking paint and rusting metal parts, in shifting light conditions, as clouds pass by and cover the sun. As it is slowly circled, the building gradually becomes a symbol of the emptiness, of the decay, of the senselessness that happen when work ceases and factories close down. In Factory (2003) Chen Chieh-jen looks at the decline of the textile industry in Taiwan around year 2000. He explains: “In the 1960s, Taiwan became an important world industrial center due to Cold War politics and its low-cost labour market. In the 1990s, Taiwan’s labour-intensive industries started migrating abroad to regions with even lower labour costs due to advancing globalization. The ensuing reduction in jobs and factory closings in Taiwan forced many workers into a state of long-term unemployment. In 2003 I invited several acquaintances who had worked at the Lien Fu Garment Factory for more than twenty years to perform in this film at their former workplace.” As the women were only willing to take part in this film if they did not have to speak, this re-enactment of the old fabric factory appears like a silent theatrical drama produced in the empty halls with only those props that still remain in them.
The high precision machine production of the Audi factory in the work by Ali Kazma and the empty factory of Chen Chieh-jen are confronted with the video installation by Pieter Hugo, which, across ten monitors, portrays the horrors of the rubbish dump of the Agbogbloshie wetlands in the suburbs of Accra, the capital city of Ghana. This work is called Permanent Error(2010), it exists as a photographic piece, a book and a video work. Here, ten people stand before us and look at us, behind them are tonnes of electronic waste, from used computers that have been scrapped by thousands of people. “They burn the devices so that the cable wires are exposed and they can harvest the more valuable materials in the chips and boards. Hardly any of this is non-toxic, the list of things that end up in the water, air and in humans is nearly endless, ranging from lead and cadmium to mercury and chromium. Yet there is no protective clothing available at all, strictly speaking, there’s not even any tools. The information age meets the stone age head on.” (Freddy Langer in “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”)
The realities of the working world currently change almost on a daily basis. That which was valid and applicable yesterday will have no value tomorrow, what we do today might soon not make any more sense. This unusual velocity of technological development disorients us, creates a feeling of insecurity, of vagueness, indistinction, perhaps elicits anxieties – in individuals, but also, with variations from region to region and continent to continent, in whole occupation groups. We are all asking ourselves: How will the rules of coexistence, of cooperation function in future? What will the relationship be between the global and the local world, between artificial intelligence and human being, between rich and poor, between winners and losers? What will the new rules, rites and rituals, the new laws be with which we are to organise our coexistence in this radical new context? There are towns that have literally been constructed around factories, they arose as a direct result of the foundation of an industry. What kind of towns are they and how do they function? What connects the industries of the future with such towns, with the community? And where do all the vast amounts of refuse that we continually produce go? How are we to dispose of them? Where do we deposit the electronic waste of today?
In her five-part video installation Ein Konzern, eine Stadt (2015-2016), Eva Leitolf discusses the relationship of the factory, of industry to the town around it using the example of Volkswagen in Wolfsburg. She brings cool black-and-white photographs in a 1950s style together with questioning, investigatory texts, holds company policies up against social processes, against town issues. In The Case(2015), Gabriela Löffel films a fictitious law case that was heard at the WTO in Geneva during the “ELSA Moot Court Competition on WTO Law.” Two teams compete against each other in a competition for young lawyers: on the one hand, the team from the Harvard Law School, the renowned private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which acted as the plaintiff team in the final; on the other hand, the team from the National and Kapodistrian University from Athens, Greece. In this law case the fictitious African state of the “Federal Republic of Aquitania” was sued by another fictitious African state, the “United Kingdom of Commercia” in the commercial court of the WTO for infringement of water rights. In disturbingly cool black-and-white images presented on two monitors, Löffel turns her gaze on the “genesis moment,” in which language becomes rhetoric and changes into a targeted instrument of discourse and politics. This process, in which laws are presented and negotiated in rhetorical form, is also, indeed above all, a political moment in which the power of language becomes visible.” (Gabriela Löffel)
In the videos Rituals and Rites of Passage by Julika Rudelius, this theme is continued in another form. In Rites of Passage(2008) we trace how young men are forcefully inducted by their mentors into the behavioural patterns of leadership; in Rituals (2012) we follow how young people in a Chinese textile market assume the gestures and behaviours of advertising: “Advertising imagery seduces and dominates attitudes, style, and body language in China just as it does elsewhere and forms a common language between two seemingly different cultures. The viewer initially encounters young, androgynous men posing seductively amidst traffic. The discrepancy between the poses and the surrounding scenery reveals the artificiality of the gesture itself and the commercialized eroticism therein, simultaneously questioning the role of the young boys ... a cheap imitation of having power and disposable wealth – a shower of nothingness.” (Julika Rudelius)
Behaviours are also visible in Thomas Vroege’s video. Here the artist investigates the purportedly untouchable position of bankers. We look at men who seem to have the world at their feet and we ask ourselves who they are and what goes through them. What happens when they lose control and their position begins to falter? InSo Help Me God (2014) Vroege accompanies us into a heavily visual poetic journey through the financial world after the economic crisis and attempts to show us the human side of this closed world, of these banking cities.
“The structural problem seems to me,” so writes Christina von Braun, “to be in the fact that everyone who has anything to do with money has to deal with a high degree of abstraction. Especially today, where money is just a symbol. The more money they earn, the more they – rightly – fear the moment in which that money reveals itself to be just a series of zeroes. This fear increases with every new profit, and this – not greed – becomes the true motivation behind the striving for ever more and ever quicker money. Fear is an impetus that turns people into the plaything of their emotions – and the need for money increases alongside this impotence.” In her videoJJA (2012), Gaëlle Boucand documents the self-representation of a French financial fugitive, who moved his domicile to Switzerland nearly twenty years ago. In his premises, in a portrait that at times appears almost surreal, JJA ponders on himself, his values, his sense for money, his conflicts with lawyers and the Swiss, his fondness for alarm systems, his fear of being the victim of fraud or a scam. The photographer and geographer Ad Nuis decided to travel to Baku, Azerbaijan, since 2005 home to the world’s largest oil pipeline, which runs through Georgia and Turkey. Nuis’ Oil & Paradise (2013) ironically examines the newly acquired wealth of the former Soviet state. Not long ago, Azerbaijan, a country under a strict dictatorship, organised the Eurovision Song Festival. It turned out to be an unabashed display of new wealth in the nation that also competed to get the football World Cup and the Olympics. Human rights are not on its agenda and only a fortunate group of people profit from the country’s affluence. However few people in the western world seem concerned about this. There is too much at stake to do so. As Nuis calls it: “It’s geopolitics on a Champions League level.”
Finally, when leaving the PhotoGallery, visitors will encounter Flocking by Armin Linke (2008, with Ulrike Barwanietz, Maša Bušic, Irene Giardina, Herwig Hoffmann, Johanna Hoth, Giuseppe Lelasi, Samuel Korn, Renato Rinaldi, Marc Teuscher). This video project at the intersection of scientific research and art production was developed during a cooperation between the Centre for Statistical Mechanics and Complexity (SMC) at the University La Sapienza in Rome, the ZKM Karlsruhe and the faculties of Photography and Media Art 3D at the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe. Through their use of camera technique and 3D visualisation, the results of the research at the University of Rome offer new conclusions on the behaviour within flocks of birds. The video shows the behaviour of individual birds when they fly together. These data, which are visually so attractive, are not just of interest for biologists and physicists, but also for economists, sociologists – and for all of us. For how are we to live and work together in future?
We live in times of shifting reality – we perceive it as a series of parallel planes that function alongside each other, consecutively, and overlapping with each other. The exhibition provides a visual representation of this by grouping the various videos in small communities in which each video is shown and simultaneously comments on, contrasts with or simply silently joins or stands apart from the other videos. The exhibition requires a little more time than usual to get to grips with it, to absorb it. Take some time to behold these works: the touching power, the strength, the energy of these moving images convey in a variety of narratives and visual languages the transformation of labour and of our lives.
