COMPANY. Photographs and Fragments on Working

COMPANY is an arts-based research project by Beatrix Zobl and Wolfgang Schneider. For more than two years, they observed work processes at an industrial enterprise as well as within themselves. What can be said about work, the activity that forms the bulk of our lives, and apart from statistics, earnings, and the notion of a "career," little is known or said? The artists endeavored to monitor this secret everyday life. As a result, the concept of "the company as a seed of capitalism" emerged as a promising basis for artistic work seeking concrete and direct engagement with criticism of the system. Industrial production helped pioneer the Fordist division of labor and is a worthy field of research, and perhaps more so as it nears the tentative end of its historical phase. The publication, COMPANY. Photographs and Fragments on Working is the visualization of this exploration of a normal working world. The term Company refers to the fundamental organizational form of the capitalist economic system, but also to the original meaning of the word, to share bread, cum pane. Company denotes the society we find ourselves in. Through images and text, the book delves into the work processes of employees at an industrial metalworking enterprise, visiting their optimized working world and questioning the role of the individual and tensions and possibilities faced within this well-established system. In the publication, text and image have equal weight and are treated thusly. They are set in relation to one other, intensively interlaced, and communicate without illustrating or commenting on the other. For this purpose, a complex image-text layout was developed together with the graphic designers. In addition to their preferred artistic mediums of photography, video and text, Zobl and Schneider also integrated oral history methods in their interviews. Their work also drew from interdisciplinary cooperation and the methods of political science, philosophy and cultural studies. Four authors contributed to this publication with their wide-ranging perspectives: Ruth Horak, art historian, curator (a.o. Danube University Krems / Visual Culture) Monika Mokre, political scientist (Austrian Academy of Sciences) Erszébet Pillinger, art historian, cultural scientist (Budapest) Tasos Zembylas, philosopher (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) Beatrix Zobl and Wolfgang Schneider see their long-term projects as arts-based research. They understand knowledge as the result of dialogue between participants rather than documentation. The fragment, the attempt or essay, was deliberately chosen as a form of representation; COMPANY does not draw a definitive conclusion from the work done in the field. Instead, the viewer plays an active role in drawing possible conclusions as well as in the composition of images, signs and words. Arts-based research is likewise anchored as an artistic practice: without an audience and interpretation, there would be no art.