The
Margins of the Factory
presents two recent projects by the Rotterdam-based duo Iratxe
Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum
that are motivated by their interest in art's
relationship with labour.
Each explores sculptural form and manufacturing processes from the
perspective of artists who have not usually made objects. Jaio
& van Gorkum
undertake what are in part sociological investigations by documenting
the local, marginal effects of the displacement of manufacturing
industries over the last two generations with the emergence of the
global market. Emerging from the artists' personal history and
implicating the direct effects of their own vocation as well as work
they ask of others, the projects are moreover complicit in asking
what
kind of industriousness brings value
and what political life objects might have.
The
exhibition opening features a performance by British “avant-folk”
musician Nathaniel
Robin Mann,
developed in collaboration with Jaio & van Gorkum around the raw
footage of Work in Progress and the tradition of work song. Mann
interprets the Basque
popular song “Oi Peio Peio” –
a dialogue between a woman worker and her cruel boss, who insists
that she carries on working throughout the night. First collected in
Cancionero Popular Vasco in 1918, the song was popularized by
singer–songwriter Mikel
Laboa,
founder of “Ez Dok Amairu” (“No Thirteen”), the cultural
movement of Basque poets, musicians and artists whose name was a
suggestion of sculptor Jorge Oteiza.
Central
to Producing
time in between other things
(2011) is a selection of wooden objects made by retired factory
worker Jos van Gorkum – Gorkum’s grandfather – which the
artists documented in the homes of his relations, friends and former
neighbours across the Netherlands. During this process, the artists
located the original lathe on which these items had been crafted and
began to teach themselves woodturning. The forms which they made as
they worked at learning a hobby become the means to support the
display of the original objects, presented alongside three videos and
photography.
Work
in Progress
(2013) immerses itself in the manufacturing industry of
Markina-Xemein, the rural Basque village where Jaio comes from. A
video documents the mass-production of rubber car parts, following
the pieces from the assembly line in a worker-owned factory to
subcontracted workshops where informal workers finish them by hand.
Several of these workers are employed by the artists to cast hundreds
of replicas of small modernist sculptures. These are displayed on
mass-produced shelving to evoke the "Chalk Laboratory" of
Basque sculptor Jorge
Oteiza,
a fierce critic of the commodification of art.
Curators:
Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum, 'The Margins of the Factory', ADN
Platform,
Sant Cugat del Vallès, Barcelona, Spain, 25 January–30 April 2014.
