The image of the communist meets the commutation test. A recited self-description of the Wobblies (the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW) is continuously recalibrated on the fly in relation to a piece of early twentieth-century film that documents workers strolling the grounds of a factory. The footage is first presented on screen, then projected back onto the surfaces of an abandoned factory space. «History Lesson» raises the question of synchronization in the image-narration montage and obliquely in the relationship between the contemporary image of the «working class», non-labor time, and an emancipatory politics.

biografia

Peter Freund is usually working on something else. He writes to avoid making art and makes art to avoid writing. He is a sometimes curator so as to avoid his own work, but usually that inspires him to write or make art. He is co-founder of the Barcelona-based artist collective, Adversorecto, which uses “retraction” as a working method for producing individual and collaborative works. www.peterfreund.art

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