Romana Schmalisch — La Chorégraphie du travail — Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers — Screening — Slash Paris

Past: March 22, 2013 → March 21, 2014

For her residence at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, the artist plans to develop a project that combines several media — installation, performance, video — and offers a reflection on the relationships between art and production, in connection with history and the site at Les Laboratoires along with its surrounding environment; it is a former metalworking factory in the Seine-Saint-Denis region near Paris, heavily marked by industry and a communist past.

La Chorégraphie du travail (“The Choreography of Labour”) is a series of lecture performances that develops at a later stage into a film project. The project revolves around the relationship of labour and art, including topics such as: the representation of production processes and power relations in film, the use of art forms by labour movements, the way artistic methods were also used to enhance efficiency in industrial production, as well as questioning ideas behind educational programmes of employment agencies. By reconstructing the diverse interconnections, both historically as well as from a contemporary perspective, the project The Choreography of Labour attempts to simultaneously investigate ways of re-establishing links between the spheres of labour and art. This reflection also serves as a starting point for reconsidering the role of the body in art/film/production as a testing ground for strategies of efficiency and education.

The journal Notes sur le mouvement follows the development of the research process and production in different stages, and presents the initial thoughts, collected materials and discussions with various people during a period of one year.