The worker moves between machines. She keeps time, maintains numbers, monitors performance. Her mind is idle. It’s an act of removal. The individual steps into the factory and becomes a worker. Separation from purpose is survival and death in equal measures. She removes herself from herself, becomes a cast detached from its original.

Factories are about control, they are about the tracking and managing of bodies, of movements and numbers. A drawing of a factory floor plan is a representation of this control. It’s an engineered abstraction distanced from the worker, removed from the physical effort of the body. By replicating the drawings on sheets of latex they become removed from this deattachement, and brought closer to the body by the skin like qualities of the latex.

But the replicas lack rigidity. They have no internal structure. They are mere shells. But there’s beauty in that too.

The project Detached was developed during Fieldstation 2022—a process-focused exhibition and residency featuring open studios by and with S L A M at Ifö Center in Bromölla, Sweden.