Work Study

The work started out from the idea of efficiancy in action and movement related to production. Archives of schemes for following up, exercising and renewing working processes were found spread over the floor of an office space. The work study system was turned hollow and absurd with the ending of production.

The project aimes at examining and acting out this absurdity as an act of possible reconciliation of the human condition in the process of change.

Following the thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty about the body’s relationship to space - traces of which are to be found as well in Yi-Fu Tuan’s writing from a geographical perspective - the first step of research was the sheer movement, by walking, through the factory site, and thereby drawing lines on a GPS device.

How could these movements possibly connect to the examination and systematizing of information found in papers spread over the office’s floor? One way to work through material and information is by creating a (new) order: following not a system of rational thought, but the physical system of size and stability, and the transformation of matter.

The urge to connect own experience with realities of the past started the search for documentary images (films and museum displays) which would show moving bodies through the same (kind of) production space. Images from more recent CCTV recording might be a starting point to reenact similar movements for videotakes.

What interests me is the human condition, embedded in and influenced by physical space, and questions of dealing with unwanted and unforeseen changes of these conditions. The work has so far been developing as a blend of subjective experience of space, accounts of former factory workers and investigation of documentary material.