Fruits of Labour
Public Art Project at REAKT: Olhares e Processos, Guimaraes (2012)
100 orange fruit trees, industrial sizes fans, framed copies of the Faridabad Majdoor Samachar
Approaching the sense of exhaustion and hopelessness of the end of a factory’s life cycle, the artists established a link between a call published in a newspaper of Faridabad, an industrial suburb of Delhi, urging the workers to change their living conditions by planting orchards in abandoned factories, and the orange groves of the “Valley of Abraham” by Manoel de Oliveira. The approximately 100 orange trees first placed in an abandoned factory (and where people felt cool breezes from the industrial fans as they walked amongst the orange trees) were later planted in the public space of Guimarães disponbilizando so its fruit would be available freely for future generations.
Raqs explores the idea of leftover, the post-mortem of industry and labour, as well as the sensory and imaginative connotations that the sentence fruits of labour may generate.