COMPANY. Working in Berndorf
Dialogue Intervention with exhibition and publication
Start: April 2007
Exhibition: April 2009
Publication: Fall/Winter 2011/2012
Attention: All relevant dates under "LOGBOOK"
"Systems of Desire: Working" project seeks to explore the people’s relationship to and understanding of "working". It is dedicated to individuals and how they deal with their work as a part of their lives, how they feel about it and what is their "pleasure while working".*
The main idea of the project is to open up spaces for debate in everyday life.
The actual endeavour, "COMPANY. Working in Berndorf", is a public intervention, research, photo and video work in a metal processing company in Berndorf, Lower Austria.
Berndorf has a long history as an industrial area in an else rural part of Austria. All kinds of economic models have passed through it: the patriarchal concept of the founding director (a member of the famous Krupp family) – confiscation in the Nazi regime – occupation and dismantling by the Soviets after the war – nationalization – manager buy out of the company in the 1980ies. Today Berndorf AG is a typical globalized corporation with stockholders.
Our project takes part in a daughter company of the Berndorf AG producing swimming pools made out of stainless steel. Especially this company, Berndorf Baederbau, was able to compensate a stagnating market through quick expansion into the East after 1989 and today has more than 150 employees in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary.
We are working self-commissioned and are financed autonomously to be free to decide what we want to show regards content.
However, the CEO finally allowed us to move, film and photograph nearly without restrictions. We have our own key to the company. We are allowed to take interviews with the employees during their working time as long as they like to do so and as long as we don't blockade the whole working process. The company also provides some infrastructur: we installed our darkroom in a small room of the company. So we can develope and enlarge films just next to the production hall. This visibility of the working character of our project turned out to be an important factor when trying to gain the trust of the participating employees, who often come by couriously to see what "the artists" are doing.
In our project we address people of all professional levels working in this company, blue collar workers as well as white collar workers as well as the management and the board of directors of the Berndorf AG.
Another tension lies in the setting itself, when we, as artists, who like to formulate our own tasks regardless of their direct usability, come to a place determined by concrete requirements towards work that has to be done and is strongly connected to making money.
The installation material of the exhibition (photos, video, audio files) will also be the basis for future parts of the Working project in different and various contexts, e.g. for a presentation in the Experimental Station/Chicago and at the Glen Arbor Art Association/Michigan or at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz.
Photocollage: Zobl/Schneider