WORK / LIVE 干活 Goethe-Institut Beijing

On 4 November 2023 the Goethe-Institut China in Beijing opened the exhibition Work, Live – 13 Years of the Social Sensibility R&D Department, curated by Social Practice Lab (SPL) together with the Department.

The Department was established in 2011 at Bernard Controls in Beijing. Though part of the company, it is not productive in the usual sense: it is based on research, observes, talks and interacts with the workers on the shop floor, and encourages them to make art spontaneously and voluntarily. It was initiated by the Italian artist and researcher Alessandro Rolandi (Li Shan) after he met Guillaume Bernard, CEO of Bernard Controls, in 2010, followed by a nine-month research residency in the Beijing factory.

In a work environment geared to efficiency, the Department tries to mobilize individual and collective creativity by introducing elements of “disturbance”. At first these were artists invited by Rolandi to stay in the factory: they entered the workshops, talked with the workers and created with them. The workers in turn took inspiration from the artists and began to make their own works. In 2014, after the artist Tianji Zhao joined, the Department defined two paths: artist residencies and the WORK / LIVE project.

WORK / LIVE is a series of artistic practices in which the workers create independently. The works grow organically out of long-term exchanges with the Department: the workers are the authors, and themes and materials come from what interests them and what they observe at work and in life. In 2015 and 2020 the Beijing method reached the Bernard Controls factories in Paris and Milan.

What works – and what people and stories – do we see when the author is no longer a professional artist, and the place of creation is no longer the studio or the contemporary art system? Starting from this question, the exhibition looked back on thirteen years of WORK / LIVE in the Beijing factory, with performances, sculptures, photographs and installations by thirteen workers, the personal stories behind them, and the collective exchange and mutual help within the factory. These works were born in the ongoing dialogue between Tianji Zhao, Alessandro Rolandi, Blandine de La Taille (Paris) and the workers, where work meets life, the individual meets society, and meaning meets meaninglessness.

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