Hanging on the wall across from the entrance are four non-working factory time clocks. The hand of each clock is set to the digits: 1-9-8-6, the year a number of steel mills in the area closed.

An old telephone pole rest at a 60-degree angle with one end mounted to the floor and the other end mounted to a beam in the ceiling. A light bulb hangs from the high end of the pole almost reaching the floor.

Beyond the pole a sheet of stainless steel hangs from the beam with a silk-screened orange image of a sculpture made by a steel worker. The lower parts of the windows are silk-screened with images of industrial ductwork and rust stains. The upper parts remain clear showing the skyline of the hillside.

A flat screen plays multiple stills of an image taken inside an abandoned steel mill. Video projections on sheets of steel contain images of 1930s archival photographs of Carrie Furnace and Homestead Works. Another shows images simultaneously divided in half like the frame of a window- the upper half of the video, abandoned steel mill reclaimed by nature, the bottom half shows smoke from a factory billowing in the sky.

To the right of the entrance hangs a long rectangular aluminum panel with 19 silk-screened images of the surface of a road. The far window shows a silk-screened image of a broken window frame from an old steel mill in the lower frame of the window. The above frame is clear with a view of Pittsburgh’s skyline buildings. A portion of the fire escape in view is painted metallic silver.

“We are most interested in the texture of memory. How it is line, what kinds of stains and blots and markings- like the telephone pole. It’s not a smooth structure anymore. Time has layered it. The work has many different ways of trying to understand what we see in Pittsburgh now. All the things we have collected have the texture of an imprint, that’s why the piece is called “Time Book”. It has that texture from the materials we engaged- from the archives of Rivers of Steel to the streets. What we are trying to do, is present a consideration on the delusion of the permanence of anything.” – Raqs Media Collective

1986

4 non-working clocks mouned on felt
Dimensions, 44x142cm

Four standard issue wall clocks, with their hands arrested at the digits 1, 9, 8, and 6. Together, they point to 1986, the year the steel industry collapsed in Pittsburgh and time stopped ticking by furnaces.

A long strip of galvanized steel bears the emboss of the high road, just past the town called harmony. On the way, possibly to Industry. 

Two short video meditations set in the post-industrial landscape of the steel town of Pittsburgh. 

Memory, the permanence of steel, the impermanence of industry and an invocation of the silent aftermath of decades of labour mark a steady measure of the flow of time. 

Within these brackets, an instance of machinic immobility; a caesural, a brief interval between shifts.  A time to stand, wait, observe and remember. Awaiting premonitions. 

Iteration shown at: Re:Frame, Lowave, Paris (2009)

Anonymous Steel Worker

Enamel screen print on stainless steel
96 inches x 58.5 inches

Every factory has a time book. The time book is an index of the value of a worker’s time. It records hours, minutes and money, and acts as the memory machine of a factory. But time also leaks out of the factory. It gets reclaimed for purposes other than those dictated by the inventory. The accounts of these nameless moments ‘occupied’ by anonymous workers never enter the factory’s time book. 

In Pittsburgh, which was once the world centre of steel production, there is an archive of labour in the steel industry called ‘Rivers of Steel’. In that archive, along with Time Books, union leaflets, photographs and newspaper clippings are a few eccentric objects. One such object is a quirky ‘dog’ made of machine parts, odds and ends, made between shifts in a steel factory by an unknown worker. This ‘dog’, the pet and companion of reclaimed time, is emblazoned in brilliant orange on a stainless steel sheet, as a heraldic tribute to an the hours that an anonymous steel worker rescued from the pages of the time book.