UNIDEE resident Raphaelle De Groot conceived an artistic workshop within the daily routine of the textile mill of Lanificio F.lli Cerruti that created a new space for communication between the workers.
The project, funded by the European Social Fund, started with Raphaelle taking part in an immersive three week apprenticeship.
She invites workers to share thoughts, reflections and ideas. The process of listening opens up many new channels of communication, making the workers enthusiastic about the initiative.
Work story
July 2002: an artist from Montreal (Canada) departs for Europe to arrive in Italy, in Biella, at Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto for a four month stay. She goes to the “Centro di Documentazione della Camera del Lavoro di Biella” and decides to do a three week “apprenticeship” at the Cerruti Brothers Mill to get a closer view of the reality of the textile industry.
Between September and October she visits the various departments of the mill, talks to the workers, studies their jobs, eats in the canteen and does the same shifts as they do. She writes and reflects about her experience. With a desire to follow up this initial “immersion” she makes use of the openness, willingness and interest of the Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto and the Cerruti Mill to begin a proper project financed by the European Social Fund.
November 2003: the young “apprentice”, called Raphaëlle, returns to deepen her research in the factory with a team of collaborators. She goes to the Mill with Sandra and Julia — with overalls, tools and drill — and to the amazement and irony of the workers, gives each department a “letterbox”, and then disappears. These boxes give the artist a way in to the factory, and serves to open a channel of communication between herself and the workers. They are to be the discrete and anonymous voice of each one of them.
January 2004, first step: personally distributing cards to each male and female worker, she asks the first question: what colour would you like to paint the box in your department? This is the start of a story. Each department has a box, each box has a colour. No-one knows where Raphaëlle wants to get to and she doesn’t try to explain, nor understand it herself: she’s looking.
Second step: she distributes a new information sheet and a pen, asking each of them to write “from 0 to 5 words” that represent the work they do. Each intervention is always spaced by a silence, a period in which Raphaëlle disappears, as if to leave them to reflect, to think about the motives behind these actions, the reasons for these questions. They become more confident in the game, and curiosity begins to grow.
At this stage of the process, five experts in employment sociology and psychology are invited to visit the place where this intervention is taking place, to talk to the workers about their experience, to examine the results on the sheets and to reach their own personal conclusions to discuss at a round table. A third card is handed out: it bears the same words the workers wrote with their own hands. They smile. Raphaëlle asks a bit more this time: “write a question then I’ll give you a camera so you can take a photograph that answers it”. While I write, these cameras are capturing images and this work is flowing like a river full of reflections, able to open new channels of communication not just between Raphaëlle and the workers but between the workers themselves, who probably see in her the chance to communicate between themselves in a different way.
In the meantime around Raphaëlle the teamwork is becoming frenetic: Julia deals with documenting the ongoing process taking hundreds of pictures; Anna rummages through the archives of the “Centro di Documentazione della Camera del Lavoro di Biella” in search of testimonies of the life lived by the workers between the ‘40’s and ‘60’s; Sandra and I get down to work to create the set-up for the exhibition that will tell everything about the project; Sara goes crazy gathering together and organising all the material necessary for realising the publication. This work is made of the stuff that nourishes life itself.
Some Reflections…
“In the artist I grasped the ability and the desire to meet and really listen to others, without thinking about the answers to give and without selecting the words given, as well as the capacity to see reality in an objective manner. When the artist asked the workers to express their working experience in five words, each one of them was obliged to look deep inside themselves, to go beyond spontaneity, grasping the reality, at times crude and heavy, of their own personal working conditions. In the interaction between artist and workers, the various individual processes, the various states of mind, enter into an organic event. As if through an open window, into the art comes experience of reality, whether subjected, suffered or voluntarily accepted. The artist became the ‘medium’ of reality: in this synthesis the event developed. Factory life from object of art became subject protagonist that explicitly expresses, in concrete words, the experience of the workers that is often crude and a long way from the freedom to develop their individual capacities, but only the workers can give valid orientations, because they live the experience from the inside, to those with the power to listen and thus innovate the organisation of the factory”.
by Guido Lazzarini, sociologist, Faculty of Economics, Turin
“She gives the input and they respond, and from there, there is dialogue. The “inhabitants” of the departments began talking to each other, and the input began to give rise to curiosity, the workers began asking which colours had been chosen in the other departments and then what similarities and differences there were between what they had written and what the other groups had”.
by Silvana Sanella, psychologist of the job
“It is her way of approaching others that renders the intervention artistic. The absence of specific ends make it into a train that passes but has no directions, a train that can be taken and that offers possibilities to those who are involved in the interventionevent and that decide to get on board, to undertake a journey above all within themselves”. “A work of art with the social as its object can produce various emotions, the reactions to the artistic performance may diverge, the attributed meanings may be different for the artist and for the observers. There is the risk that the people involved at the mill, both workers and management, do not grasp the opportunities present in the itinerary, waiting for the end, not making things happen themselves, not seeing in the event an occasion to reflect and become aware, not reacting with awareness to the opportunity offered by the artist, not coming forward to question, not undertaking the itinerary themselves, wishing themselves to do so exactly as Raphaëlle hopes”.
by Claudia Piccardo, Organisational psychologist, faculty of Psychology, Turin e Filippo Pellicoro, psychologist, Psychology Department, Turin
"Raphaëlle de Groot — though I’m not sure whether this is what she has in mind — is a young artist whose works seem aimed toward giving form to the invisible”. “And then — then I find myself with the cards compiled by the workers, both men and women, in hand. The cards on which they “choose the colours” — an explosion of repressed desire, that choice of colours, a cry for freedom: “orange with a big daisy in the middle” — it’s the imagination that’s suddenly set free, between lilac and gold and zebra stripes ending in a rainbow the colour of peace. I move on. The second packet of cards. The work. The words like lead. From 0 to 5 words to describe it, your work. Monotonous. Repetitive. There’s who can’t go on after the second word, as if crushed by the monotony and repetitiveness of their work. Sad. (…) But here a laconic card tells another story: “Sadness, boredom, money”. I mentally transform this sequence into an equation: “Sadness+money=boredom”? “Sadness=boredom+money”? “Money=sadness+boredom”? I can’t quite understand the combination of factors. Then there’s “humiliating”. Humiliating? How so? But even so the word comes back all the time, too often to be simple chance. Sometimes: “with no dignity”. The positive descriptions of work are more abstract: they don’t speak of work in itself but of its attributes: pleasant, interesting, creative, engaging. Or they talk of what work brings: “future, well-being, peace of mind”. Some are moral declarations: “sacrifice/ satisfaction”. Or rational: “Need to live”. The concreteness of a job lived in a positive way emerges, curiously, through an expression: “fun”. “I have fun with my workmates”. Or simply: “laughter”. Or, more elaborately: “I like being with people to have fun and joke with everyone”. (…) Instead, the words that describe working conditions are really concrete: noisy. Dusty. Dirty. The menders are a female worker aristocracy: their work is interesting, full of responsibility, engaging, satisfying. The weavers instead don’t seem to be in conditions much different to those sung by Hauptman: Tiring, stressful work, poorly paid and still we have to say “just as well we’ve got it”.”
by Chiara Sebastiani, Political Sciences Faculty, Bologna
