PUNCH /FLASH/GLOW
Kloental Triennale (Glarus, CH)
2024
LETHE seeks gaps in history and situates the body as site of production and repository of knowledge. It is so that LETHE’s works seek to resist one-dimensional perceptions of time and reality. They often intervene site-specifically, in order to widen the notion fixed structures - such as architecture. Also in their newest works for the Triennale, LETHE’s interest goes toward gestures of power exertion and its subtle circumventions in the form of hidden or unannounced solidarities.
The individual and connected works enter into traces of history at site, and engage in its underlying notions of violences (through exploitation of workers, particular of women, minors, migrants or the history of enmeshment with global coloniality) while also engaging the possible
openings of (invisible unnoticed and underlying) ever-existing resistances through quiet solidarities (arrhythmical connections).
Rhythm comes from Greek rhythmós and is etymologically affiliated with rheîn “to flow”. The Rhythms the work is picking up on site are:
- The rhythm of former machine-work, of prepping, threading, lubricating, attaching, of machine-powered spinning and weaving, stopping, breaking, halting
- The rhythm of bodies that have labored the machines
- The rhythm of pumping water into its own small power plants
- The rhythm of a punchcard-puncher, of clocked, measured, surveilled
(-and punished if wrongly punched) work time
- The rhythm of a humans’ breath at rest
- The rhythm of history echoing through sites
- The rhythm of a tattoo needle piercing skin layer and inscribing new traces into skin
- Rhythm of symbolic value traveling toward material accumulation
The series of work enact their own rhythmical choreography leaving through different strata on site. The site being the factory, its enmeshment in the global colonial endeavor indirectly, the site also being the breathtaking mountainous landscape and its notions of beauty and violence, neutrality and contention.
Concretely the works consist of:
FLASH is a mono print work in 11 parts, is dispersed across the area of the exhibition. Varied rose motifs that have been designed, then printed and exported in ‘other’ cultural contexts in the thousands in the Glarus for centuries, are now depicted on tattoo transfer foil, barely visible. One of the most commonly tattooed symbols, the rose mirrors how arbitrarily value is assigned to cultural symbols: In one locality it reads as “elegant” while in another it is degraded as “kitschy”.
GLOW
For the exhibition on such specific site, LETHE invites former textile workers from the Glarus, to leave their traces in a work titled «GLOW» (2024): The workers deposit blue pigment on the facade of the building guided by an “inner choreography” which echoes the rhythm of their formerly executed work still inscribed in their bodies.
Throughout the exhibition site, LETHE leaves traces of various (lived, produced, broken) rhythms. The works raise a transformative potential that affect the place and become palpable for visitors.