The Song of the Shirt

The work departs from Ernst Toller’s play “Die Maschinenstürmer” (1922), but relocates its themes along the remnants and ruins of the cotton industry, in post-2011 Egypt and post-industrial Poland. Actualizing a criticism of technology, the film re-reads the Luddites movement for a contemporary body of the worker that is always already informed by the histories of technological progress. Filmed in one continuous shot, the movements of a seamstress, a projectionist, the screen maker and the film crew as the choir seek to find ways to intervene in the cyclic structure, possible disruptions, torn between the historical continuity and an urge to deviate the progressive form. Slow down, stop, don’t proceed.
Projections on off-white cotton screens document production methods in the fields of cotton agriculture, weaving, processing, sewing, and storytelling—all narrative structures that can tell us about complex social changes in everyday life experiences. In a counter- narrative, two voices seek out subverted forms of sabotage, practices of weaving the stories and telling the textiles that may be (to quote Haraway) “making practices, pedagogical practices, and cosmological performances.” (Kerstin Schroedinger)