DRAW ___ THE LINES

Fashion is a hyper-capitalist industry reliant on the mass production of cheap, disposable clothing. Labourers on clothing production lines perform repetitive, mechanical tasks devoid of creativity or decision-making, alienating them from their work and humanity (Marx, 1844). At the same time, factories enforce temporal and spatial discipline, a form of control that extends into workers’ lives outside the factory, shaping their everyday behaviours and routines (Smart, 1983).

Draw the Lines explores this alienation inside a Thai button factory's production line as well as its internalisation in workers’ personal lives. The project critically examines how factory processes reshape human movements—once organic and natural—into rigid, monotonous, and linear patterns focused solely on efficiency (Ingold, 2007). It does so by developing a form of situated durational performance practice manifest in a tripartite series of works which expose and enact these experiences.

A 10-hour film documents a durational performance in which I monotonously repeat bodily movements from a 9-hour work shift of a Thai button factory's production line, which I visited and observed under the constraints of efficiency, space, and time. An 8-minute cut intersperses footage with process-oriented experiments which highlight the influence of factory control extending into workers’ lives. Finally, a set of clothing labels stitched into fast-fashion garments reveal the nature of exploitation associated with specific items available in high street stores worldwide to prompt consumer awareness.

This practice takes inspiration from performance artist Tehching Hsieh and filmmaker Cao Fei's whose works use the body and time as key tools to explore human conditions, as well as Brechtian and Boalian theories to engage audiences in confronting alienation directly. It reveals the structural realities of production, encouraging audiences—whether as consumers or capitalists—to become aware of their roles and boundaries, and ask where they will draw the line.