Production Stills: Slow Aesthetics, Redundant Labor and the Politics of the Global Textile Industry

Chen Chieh-jen’s 2003 film Factory follows a group of workers as they navigate the abandoned Lien Fu garment factory in Taiwan, from which they had been laid-off several years earlier as a result of global outsourcing. Through a series of slow, meandering pans and still frames, the silent film follows the workers as they navigate the now derelict space—filled with disused objects and equipment—and begin performing the bodily gestures and internalized choreographies that had once occupied their daily lives. Juxtaposed with images and footage of the factory at a time when it was thriving, as well as subsequent worker strikes and struggles centred there, the workers’ return appears almost as a haunting—their once productive labor aesthetically transformed into a poetically empty gesture. By highlighting the human dimension of processes often considered in pragmatic economic terms through foregrounding some of the real workers upon whom the negative consequences of economic globalization weigh most heavily, Factory demonstrates the local impact of global outsourcing and international capitalist expansion in Taiwan. Taking this film as a starting point, this paper will discuss the potential of artistic and documentary practices to reveal and unsettle the power relations and structures of exploitation established by global capitalism through an analysis of works (Jeremy Hutchison, Fabrications, 2013-16; N. S. Harsha, Nations, 2009; Micha Peled, China Blue, 2005) which address the politics of labour outsourcing, consumerism, and worker resistance in the globalized garment industry.