Residency, curated resource space, public programme.
The Tetley, Leeds, 2014.
Process / material / manufacture brought together a series of events and an evolving presentation of research and resources in the resource space of The Tetley, Leeds.
Drawing on The Tetley’s history as former brewery headquarters, the project placed industrial processes in relation to forms of publishing through an exploration of material manipulation, repetition, and the organisation of labour. Risograph reproductions of industrial archive materials were presented alongside artists’ publications on a series of bespoke display structures.
Programme
Manual Labours: Screening and discussion. COPY was in conversation with Jenny Richards of Manual Labours about their project exploring people’s physical relationships to work, contextualised by the screening of two films: Harun Farocki’s Worker Leaving the Factory and Pilvi Takala’s The Trainee.
Harun Farocki’s 1995 work Worker Leaving the Factory presents a history of workers appearing in film since the late 19th Century. Beginning with the film Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory In Lyon (La Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon, 1895) by the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière (45 seconds), which shows approximately 100 workers at a factory for photographic goods in Lyon-Montplaisir leaving through two gates and exiting the frame to both sides, Farocki set himself the task of bringing together footage of workers leaving their workplaces in documentaries, industrial and propaganda films, newsreels and features. Originally presented as a 12 screen installation, Manual Labours presented a selection of clips from the work.
Films from The Trainee (2008) follow Pilvi Takala working for a month as trainee ‘Johanna Takala’ in the marketing department of Deloitte, a company offering integrated services that include audit, tax, consulting and corporate finance. Her absence of visible action slowly make the atmosphere around the trainee unbearable and force the colleagues to search for solutions and come up with explanations for the situation. Takala explores non-doing as lacking a place in the general order of things, and thus acting as a threat to order. The Trainee was produced in a collaboration with Deloitte and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art and supported by Finnish Cultural Foundation.
Manual Labours is supported by the Centre for Media, Culture and Creative Practice, Birkbeck.
In-conversation with Jenny Richards (Manual Labours):
Q & A and Discussion:
COPY: Art and Publishing round-table conversation: COPY founders Joanna Loveday and Charlotte Morgan spoke about the Process / Material / Manufacture project and their practice as artists, writers and publishers in an informal discussion. The event drew on issues surrounding self-publishing and the published form, labour, fundraising and artist-led curatorial models, and current debates around the presence of experimental writing in the fields of visual art, performance and literature.