A warning sign greets us as we step into what resembles an industrial site. Guided along a fenced path, we move past strip curtains, sector markings, and a tangle of pipes, accompanied by an atmospheric soundtrack. When open to the public, performers in overalls mingle with visitors, carrying out a range of tasks, some suggesting maintenance work, others evoking roles more familiar from theme parks: greeting, animating, and directing. What remains unclear is whether anything is actually being produced.
The longer we wander, the more the illusion of an industrial site begins to unravel. It reveals itself as a collage, an imagined environment that fails to fully reflect its real-life counterparts. In these gaps, the installation emerges as a composition of fragments that together construct a nostalgic vision of “the industrial” as part of the 20th century. Drawn from a broad range of fleeting images hovering between techno-futurism and impending apocalypse, it does exert a strange, magnetic pull and points towards what is omitted in this exaggerated interplay of codes of the industrial imagery.
The patchwork of aestheticised elements points at an absence at the heart of the stylised industrial imaginary. We do see neither workers nor their labor. While factories in the Global North may have largely given way to service and knowledge economies, and their sites often lie abandoned or have been repurposed, industrial production has not disappeared. It has merely shifted elsewhere, outsourced to the Global South, where cheap workforce continues to sustain the ever growing demands of global consumption.
The installation reminds us how easily this knowledge fades in the face of stylised representations and discussions of labor in the postmodern age. Like a theme park offering a world of clarity and control, the industrial imaginary presents us with a sanitised version of the complex relations of dependence and power that are inextricably linked to “the industrial“. Yet there is no place for hardship or labour in the stereotypical staging of the industrial. Simulation overrides reality. Thus the immersive work seems to echo a critique voiced by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Under capitalist modernity not only goods, but also experiences, desires, and perceptions are produced, ultimately turning life into representation. Direct experience gives way to images, consumed by spectators. The spectacle conceals, asks us to, and makes us forget that things might not be as easily consumable as the images make us think they are.
By materialising the industrial fantasy once more, reinserting it into a former site of production, still devoid of function but theatrically charged, the installations make us wonder what the spectacle conceals, what it asks us to forget. Industrial production has not vanished; it has been rendered invisible. The language around labor has changed; the structures of control, alienation, and exploitation persist, more subtly encoded but no less powerful. We are “post-industrial” only by name.
Text: Elsa Himmer