One Family of Objects
a book
2010
A5 format, 1000 copies
published by JRP Ringier and tranzit.org

In 2005, the factory where I had completed my apprenticeship at the start of the 1990s, and where my parents had worked for several decades, definitively went bankrupt. Most of the machines were sold off to small-scale workers or large manufacturing complexes in India and Mexico. One of the steel colossi was also bought by my father and mother. I developed this part of the story in the work Two Families of Objects. Following its public presentation, I decided to search out all the machines and ask their new owners to take photographs of them. The material thus gathered became the basis for a work of reportage, accompanied by a photographic supplement, in which I tried to underscore the relationships between the new owners and these machines, whose aesthetics are characterised by green paint, the pungent smell of oil and steel shavings. The general social and economic reasons that led to the collapse of the company were sketched out on the backdrop of this micro-narrative of people and machines. Deliberations about these reasons provide an alternative view of the end of heavy industry in Central Europe.