Things Things Say

Eulàlia Rovira
A Knot Which is Not, 2020-2021

Eulàlia Rovira gives voices to Things Things Say. During the course of the exhibition she is creating a new work of art using written and spoken language. It distorts the textual and verbal conventions of exhibition making, as well as tampering with the genres of magical realism and historical fiction. Enlisting art things present in the gallery, things of inquiry, evidence-things, and things in the world—as well as things about them that were unknown before the exhibition opened—she doubts their reticence, trusts that they mean what they say, but not that they say what they mean.

Sound recordings have also been made of her reading a short text composed entirely of questions which forms the exhibition’s introduction. Additionally, Rovira is the spokesperson for the words that have been written by the curators to accompany each of the works of art, and other meaningful things, that form the exhibition. Perhaps you are listening to her voice now, whether it is speaking in Catalan, Spanish, or English.

Sarah Ortmeyer
SABOTAGE, 2009

Fragments of clogs are strewn on the floor: broken off, smashed up, chopped into splinters, reduced to dust. The word “sabotage” has come to mean deliberately damaging something, especially with a political motivation: tampering, wrecking, vandalising, hacking. It derives from the French noun sabot and the earlier savate: a wooden shoe. (The same root accounts for the Spanish zapato, and the Italian ciabatta.) A common theory of the origin of the word’s current meaning hinges on legends of French weavers tossing their wooden footwear into machines during the industrial revolution to protest the new automation technology which threatened their craft. Throwing a spanner in the works, clogging up the production lines. However, the original sense of the verb saboter, from around 1890, described the clumsiness of the agricultural labourers who were brought into cities in France as replacement workers during strikes. Their wooden shoes were more suitable for walking in the fields than in the factories. Yet, this pointed to another kind of labour dispute strategy, in which workers did not stop production but continued inefficiently through creative bungling or a reduction of competence—a precursor of the “go-slow” strike used as an employee tactic in modern industrial conflicts.

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SABOTAGE, 2009
Wood and sawdust
Dimensions variable
Collection FRAC Grand Large – Hauts-de-France, Dunkerque, France

Unknown author
Workers in Clogs and Espadrilles, 1932

In the early 1930s, 1,800 people worked at Compañía Anónima Hilaturas de Fabra y Coats. The company produced grey, white, black, and coloured thread in 200-yard reels, and spools by the kilo or metre, among other formats. Women made up 80% of the work force. They were in charge of spinning, weaving, twisting, and winding the cotton thread, whereas the men transported the raw materials to the machines and dyed and bleached the cotton, which predominantly came from Tunisia and Egypt. This work was done on the land now occupied by the Escola Can Fabra, in one of the many buildings that made up the industrial complex.

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Workers in Clogs and Espadrilles, 1932
Photograph (modern print)
Courtesy of the Friends of Fabra i Coats Association

Francesc Serra i Dimas
Fabra i Coats. Cabdell de fil [Ball of Thread], 1930s–1940s

The large-scale manufacturing of printed cotton fabrics known as indianes (chintz or calico textiles) throughout the 18th century heralded the modern textile industry in Barcelona. In 1903, the Compañía Anónima Hilaturas de Fabra y Coats was constituted from the fusion of eight family businesses: three Catalan and British corporate societies, and five factories in Sant Andreu, Sant Martí de Provençals, Sant Vicenç de Torelló, and Manresa. Specialising in processing raw fibre and spinning, twisting, and weaving it into threads of all forms, it soon became the most successful textile sector company in the Spanish state.

Also in 1903, the self-taught photographer and lithographer Francesc Serra i Dimas began an artistic career portraying painters, sculptors, architects, and musicians—whether alone in their homes, working in studios, or en plein air. Producing around 90,000 photographs throughout his life, Serra became one of the leading chroniclers of Barcelona’s modern artists. He also worked as a commercial photographer documenting art, antiques, and exhibitions for galleries and collectors, as well as portraying a host of things, commodities, and buildings for packaging and promotional materials, including hotel visiting cards, and a catalogue for a bell foundry. He also worked on the photography and visual communication of the products made at Fabra i Coats, taking pictures of thread wound or formed into spools, balls, tubes, or hanks. The photographic negatives would often be masked with opaque red paint in order to isolate the object against a white background when printed.

By 1933, 86% of the income of the Compañía Anónima Hilaturas de Fabra y Coats resulted from sales of cotton thread in various forms. By then, the use of cotton for sewing had largely replaced silk and linen, and production had greatly expanded due to the invention and popularisation of the electric sewing machine and as clothing production shifted from the domestic to the industrial sphere. In the 1930s Fabra i Coats began producing thread for cord, a fabric used to reinforce car tires. New commercial agreements with the companies Firestone and Michelin led to the hiring of more than 100 women.

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Fabra i Coats. Cabdell de fil [Ball of Thread], 1930s–1940s
Photomechanical print (modern print)
Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona

Master Key, Unknown date

This master key opened doors all over the factory. The only copies were kept by the manager, the fire services, and Pere Fernàndez Bori, current president of the Friends of Fabra i Coats Association, whose members are former workers. Pere worked at the factory for more than 40 years, where he rose to the position of head of maintenance, until the company closed down definitively in 2005.

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Master Key, Unknown date
Courtesy of the Friends of Fabra i Coats

Annette Kelm

Vitrine zur Geschichte der Frauenbewegung… [Vitrine on the history of the women’s movement…] Bonn… Berlin… Stuttgart…, 2013

Latzhose 1, “Relaxed”… 2, “Standard”… 3, “Kicking leg”… 4, “Jumping”, 2014

In mid-1970s West Germany, lilac-coloured overalls became an emblem and uniform for a new wave of feminists. Wearing lila Latzhosen became a popular shorthand for a radical social politics and protest against gendered division of work and discriminatory laws, and for birth control. In the 1980s, only about half of West German women worked outside the home. Dyeing the functional garment with a purple colour long associated with the women’s movement represented both an incursion into the patriarchal domain of factory labour and a rejection of emphatically female-gendered fashion codes. Overalls were often DIY-dyed, resulting in a range of lavenders and pinks rather than a standard shade. Examples of these dungarees can now be found in the collections of several museums in Germany. Presented in display cases alongside other artefacts, the overalls often seem like forlorn memorabilia from a past that has now been mothballed or outgrown. Yet garments that are freed from the complex background of this historical context seem to intuitively take on new lives of their own in the present. Whether kicking or relaxed, the animated overalls no longer merely stand in for a historical moment; they give shape and possibility to fresh political emotions and new movements.

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Vitrine zur Geschichte der Frauenbewegung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn [Vitrine on the history of the women’s movement in the Federal Republic of Germany, Foundation House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn], 2013
C-print, framed
70.5 × 55.5 × 4 cm

Vitrine zur Geschichte der Frauenbewegung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin [Vitrine on the history of the women’s movement in the Federal Republic of Germany, German Historical Museum, Berlin], 2013
C-print, framed
80.6 × 62.5 × 4 cm

Vitrine zur Geschichte der Frauenbewegung in Baden-Württemberg, Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart [Vitrine on the history of the women’s movement in Baden-Württemberg, House of History Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart], 2013
C-print, framed
80.5 × 65 × 4 cm

Latzhose 1, “Relaxed”, 2014
C-print, framed
81.2 × 66.8 × 4 cm

Latzhose 2, “Standard”, 2014
C-print, framed
81.2 × 66.8 × 4 cm

Latzhose 3, “Kicking leg”, 2014
C-print, framed
79.5 × 64.8 × 4 cm

Latzhose 4, “Jumping”, 2014
C-print, framed
79.8 × 64.8 × 4 cm

Courtesy of the artist and König Galerie, Berlin/London

James N. Kienitz Wilkins
This Action Lies, 2018

This Action Lies is a film composed of three static shots centring on an apparently unremarkable industrial product—a white foam coffee cup from Dunkin’ Donuts. Do you “really think that if you stare at something long enough, it’ll reveal its secrets?”, the narrator wonders in the fast-paced voiceover. Multiplying matter-of-fact observations about the history of the coffee chain and the circumstances of the film’s production with reflections on veracity and trust, the intense focus on the representation of the cup overflows with diversions and doubts.

Unlike the post-hippie capitalism and European lifestyle pretensions of coffee companies like Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts built its brand on the identity of the hot drink as a utilitarian fuel for proud American workers. The beverage container in This Action Lies is not only evidence of a patriotic, cheap, and appealing way to power productivity; it also stimulates humorous and introspective rumination on the fundamental nature of faith, hope, life, self-image, and the value of making analog films. Single-use polystyrene foam packaging cannot be effectively recycled, and many cities have now banned it, including New York. In early 2018 Dunkin’ Brands Group announced plans to eliminate this now obsolete cup from its global supply chain and to complete the transition to its new more sustainable double-walled paper cup by the end of 2020.

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This Action Lies, 2018
Digital video, sound
32 min
Courtesy of the artist and the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève – Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018

Stuart Whipps
The Kipper and the Corpse, 2004–ongoing

By 1979 more than 4 million units of the small economy car known as the Mini had been driven off the production line in the UK, principally at the Longbridge plant in Birmingham. This vast industrial site had dominated the social and economic identity of the area for almost exactly 100 years until its eventual closure in 2005 with the loss of more than 5,000 jobs.

Between 2004 and 2007 Stuart Whipps photographed the entire factory site. In 2014, he acquired a rusting chassis of a 1979 Mini in order to try and further understand the broader lessons of the demise of Longbridge and the British Leyland company through a narrow focus on the slow process of learning to restore a single vehicle made in a pivotal year. Throughout the 1970s Longbridge was infamous for the strikes which frequently brought car production to a halt. Struggling to make a profit, British Leyland had gone bankrupt and been nationalised in 1975. Workers and trade union leaders were the target of relentless jokes in the right-wing press. The restructuring and reforms at Longbridge that directly followed the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979 were a tumultuous turning point in the disempowerment of the trade unions and the imposition of neoliberalism in the UK.

Whipps collaborated with the retired British Leyland employee Keith Woodfield in the process of taking apart the car, and rebuilding and repairing it. The majority of the work was carried out in public in a temporary workshop at the former Longbridge site, which by then had been redeveloped as a new town centre. The engineering expertise and stories of Woodfield and his colleagues became integral to the project as it expanded inexorably towards further fieldwork, oral history, and archival research. During the course of its four-year restoration, the vehicle was presented in different contexts, from automotive trade shows to art museums and social clubs. A trigger for conversations about classic post-war design on the one hand, yet an embodied memory of often demoralising labour conditions on the other, the car seems both solidly if ambiguously ordinary as well as deeply, messily political.

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The Kipper and the Corpse, 2004–ongoing
British Leyland Mini 1275 GT, documents and photographs on table, video on monitor, transcripts of conversations
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist. Commissioned by WERK as part of the Longbridge Public Art Project. Dedicated to the memory of Keith Woodfield.

Haegue Yang
VIP’s Union, 2001–2020

First presented in Berlin in 2001, VIP’s Union is a collaborative conceptual artwork that consists of a temporary gathering of furniture on loan from a group of very important people: prominent figures from different fields of local society. Each time the work is presented, the meaning of what or who is “very important” is modulated by and according to the context. The borrowed tables and chairs create a kind of subverted VIP hospitality area that is non-exclusive and freely accessible, and where value is defined and produced by the generosity of the lenders. The eventual arrangement of the furniture as part of an exhibition is formed through an organising procedure of advocacy, solicitation, feedback, choice, and interpretation that is shaped and shared between the artist, the prospective lenders, the curators, and the staff of the hosting institution.

At Fabra i Coats, tables and chairs of distinct styles, origins, and functions, each with their own unique significance to their owners, have been transposed from domestic or workplace settings into the exhibition space. Brief notes of provenance written by each lender relate to the corresponding item. The furniture is arranged in small clusters forming a new and heterogenous community, a union which, although it did not ask to be constituted, is nevertheless affiliated through individual acts of goodwill and sustained through its new context of institutional responsibility and care.

Caught between dislocation and belonging—neither commodities, nor art objects, nor permanent gifts—each item of loaned furniture is not simply a surrogate or a straightforward narrator for its owner. People and things write mutual biographies. Whether a mundane plastic chair or a cherished heirloom, these supposedly inanimate things might appear as themselves, yet they also create, maintain, and perform social rituals and are repositories of memories. Although based on a simple procedural design, VIP’s Union has nevertheless played out in often unexpected ways. While the coronavirus pandemic has created a novel solidarity founded precisely on not gathering and not touching, Yang’s work alludes to a form of non-tactile proximity, a muted communication of transmission and difference.

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VIP’s Union, 2001–2020
Borrowed chairs and tables
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist

Adrià Julià

Popcorn, 2012

Popcorn, 2019

Popcorn is a feature-length movie adapted from footage shot by the Californian photo optics company Photron to demonstrate the capabilities of a model of ultra-high-speed camera. The slow-motion pop of a single popcorn kernel has been further prolonged by extending the 12-second film to a duration of 90 minutes. A soundtrack has been added, and the movie is accompanied by a poster.

When heated, the moisture bound within the starchy core of a seed kernel of the everta variety of the plant species Zea mays turns to steam. The pressure increases until the hard hull bursts and the gelatinised interior forcefully expands and cools to create what we know as popcorn, a form of maize. The kernels of the earliest maizes were too tough to chew or grind into flour, and ancient indigenous peoples throughout Central and South America, especially in Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico would have popped them. The Aztecs ate popcorn but also used it for ornamentation. In the 16th century, Spanish colonists described ceremonies with popcorn, momochitl in the Nahuatl language. Centuries later, with the invention of the steel plough in 1837, European settler colonialists in the United States were able to break the thick grasses of the prairies. The fertile soils of the Midwest were transformed, and the upper Mississippi Valley soon became known as the Corn Belt. Despite the Great Depression of the 1930s, popcorn remained an affordable treat in the Midwestern United States, and the snack industry thrived as popping machines became commonplace in movie theatres. Popcorn began its inexorable association with Western cinema, mass appeal, and profit-making.

The truism that selling popcorn is much more lucrative than screening films, the packaging more expensive than the contents, shadows the complex and intractable historical explosion of capitalism’s ecologies and colonialism’s extortion. In this sense, Popcorn the movie is a documentary drama about the silencing of indigenous cultures and the magnitude of their influence, a sort of technical and mythic counterpoint to accelerationism, short attention spans, and short-horizon perspectives. Popcorn is also an American horror movie in which industrial violence and cultural supremacy lie behind a gesture as apparently mundane and mindless as the consumption of a low-stress, low-calorie snack.

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Popcorn, 2012
HD video, colour, sound
90 min
Courtesy of the artist
Screening: 6 November 2020, 19:00 h, Zumzeig, Carrer Béjar, 53. Barcelona.

Popcorn, 2019
Giclée print, framed
100 × 70 cm
Courtesy of the artist