It is “…in proximity that the reading begins: no longer the totalizing gaze, … that grasps a finite whole… the reading begins of the movement of proceeding … The word ‘lavoro’ … means ‘I work’ and, at the same time, it is the noun ‘work’, that is, it is simultaneously act and result of the act, it is verb, therefore movement, and simultaneously it is what happens in this movement.” (Remo Gaibazzi)
In the goods we buy and ‘consume’ we see objects that increase our comfort or help us create the image of ourselves that we, more or less consciously, strive to project. We often do not reflect upon the fact that they are the product of human action and embody a process of transformation, of time spent working. An action we do not see, but that can be sensed if we look closely enough.
Loosely inspired by Remo Gaibazzi’s work, this photographic project is a meditation on the invisibility of labour and an invitation to delve beyond the use and exchange values of ‘commodities’ to consider the hidden human energy they embody.
I took some textiles and I ‘went in’ between the interweaving of their constituent fibres. And then the object ceased to be just the thing it was and spoke of the action that can be sensed, through the filtering light, in the apparent movement and irregularities of the repeated patterns of abstract and decontextualized forms; an action that is suggestive of the labour-time that those forms shaped.
In the last fifteen years of his life, Italian painter Remo Gaibazzi (1915-1994, https://www.remogaibazzi.net/archivio/) created paintings by repeating obsessively the word lavoro (which in Italian means both work and labour) expressed in different techniques, colours, and geometric structures. The results are abstract forms, often reminiscent of weaving works, in which the constituent word, lavoro, provides both the source of the pattern and the meaning of the artistic sign – a word that can only be seen by going very close to the painting. In this artistic production, the meaning of the word lavoro and its dilution into an abstract movement reflect the transposition from an alienated and alienating labour to a re-appropriation of the labour-time that is an expression of human action.
Just as in the production of goods, in art what unites the act and the result of the act is time, labour-time: “art in its history has always denied being work, because it wanted to be a higher expression” (Remo Gaibazzi).
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