WORK / LIVE 干活 Bernard Controls Italy

The team at Bernard Controls Italy collected images and texts from the activities of the two Social Sensibility R&D Departments, in Beijing and Paris-Gonesse, and assembled them into a calendar for 2021, with this introduction:

“Art for the people, by the people.” The Social Sensibility R&D Department is an experimental department led by a collective of artists – Alessandro Rolandi and Tianji Zhao in China, Blandine de La Taille in France. It works inside the two main sites of one company, Bernard Controls, a techno-industrial family business for three generations: for eight years at its production site in Beijing and for five in Paris-Gonesse.

The artists use their own practice as a tool of inquiry in the relational sphere. The department works partly as an established research site, where the artists cultivate individual and collective dynamics with the company’s employees every week, and partly as an artist residency, inviting outside artists to intervene for flexible periods. The company’s workers become “users of art”, interacting constantly – as their time and will allow – with the department’s artists and with guest artists.