Exploring the nature of mass-manufacture, Revital Cohen’s 75 Watt project brings together visual art and contemporary choreography.
Revital Cohen and Tuur van Balen have collaborated to create a choreographic dance performance using labourers manufacturing a product in a mass-production line.
The project seeks to go beyond the assembling of a product to explore the production line from the context of hyper-fragmented labour to the condition of the human body on the assembly line. Scientific management of every move made transforms each labourer into a kind of man-machine and highlights the most human-form of motion: dance.
The design of the object was informed by research we carried out into conventional consumer goods such as kettles, hand-held vacuums and hairdryers, and the movements involved in assembling them, says Cohen.
The dance/assembly of products took place in Zhongshan, China between 10 and 19 March 2013 and resulted in the creation of 40 objects and a film documenting choreography and movement.
