Initially conceived to observe the rhythms of workers at the Reijmyre glass factory during their lunch breaks, the hand-drawn band became less an object than a process, a way to think-with the gestures of labour and my own counter-labour. Limited access shaped the work: unable to enter the break room, I traced fleeting glimpses of gestures only through the glass window, noting both their presence and absence. This condition shifted the act of marking from representation toward translating fragments of perception into a parallel system of notation. Each two-minute interval required a decision, whether to shade, annotate, or leave blank, so that the marks encode both the workers’ labour and the attentive work of recording. In this sense, the band is double-sided, inscribing regulated time while also bearing the trace of my own.
Placed side by side, the sheets resemble punch cards once used to track productivity and regulate factory time, yet here they invert that function by inscribing rest, absence, and counter-labour. The work exposes how factory rhythms and my own project time were equally structured and constrained, folding production and pause into a shared temporality. Rather than pristine openness, the gesture arose from a mediated and partial encounter that reflects post-rural conditions quietly embedded in the site.
Rural contextual practice – Everything you want was already here: a KUNO workshop focused on site-responsive making in rural contexts, led by facilitators Daniel Peltz, Dr. Vytautas Michelkevičius, Sissi Westerberg, and David Larsson – artists and educators who open the field to new ways of thinking and creating. The host organisation is Rejmyre Art Lab.
© 2022
