One day’s work/wear worn through (2018)
30 items of workwear with burn holes embroidered with red thread. Clothes rail and hangers.
To be worn (initially by Muster Station and members of the public during the School of Beginnings at Tate Modern).
Dimensions variable.♦
30 items of workwear; one multi-gig worker’s daily wardrobe, each modified with a finger hole in order to check whether the worker’s heart is still beating; a ‘uniform’ to be worn by Muster Station during the School of Beginnings. The garments range from boiler suits for car mechanical and agricultural work to catering aprons and lab/warehouse coats, each bearing the marks of interaction between a worker’s body and different forms of manual labour. Imagining a future where the economic conditions are such that a single worker would have to hold down 30 different jobs in the course of a day, before their inevitable replacement by a robot, a small hole allows them (or someone else?) to check that, despite constant labour, they are still alive, and haven’t transmogrified into an automaton.
One day’s work/wear worn through could be seen as a companion work to Chodzko’s Sleepers (2013)(in its theme of exhaustion in relation to a punctum), but also relates to performative works imagining a redesign of how social space is used, such as Spare Room (2014) and M-path (2006).
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