'Traces of Labour’ is a gathering of industrial remnants that hold the chemical and social history of production in Companhia União Fabril industrial park in Barreiro, Portugal. These industrial remnants aren’t neutral. A piece of salvaged timber offcut from Barreiro’s industrial park or a fragment of industrial patina, form an act of resistance to the forces of economic and industrial development - the labour of the individual replaced more and more by that of groups functioning within factories, corporations, unions, and conglomerates.

Among the set of objects is a discarded Grelha Dupla - the hinged Portuguese fish/meat grill - a domestic object used at the table, over coals, held by hand. Its iron, fire-blackened, shaped by food and family. The intent was to weave plastic industrial cables around a rusted Grelha Dupla as a way to bind the domestic to the infrastructural, arresting function to reveal entanglement. The cable - a product of Barreiro’s petrochemical turn - holds the colonial food ritual hostage, preserving both as waste and making their codependence structural.

For Medha Khosla, the idea is to blur the boundary between production and reproduction. The home is traditionally the site of reproduction: care, rest, family, while the factory is the site of production: labour, capital, extraction. Housing factory matter makes the abstract history of extraction and labour, bodily and present. You sweep around it. You bump into it. It stains, in turn forcing these two spheres to occupy the same space. Industrial materials carry an “aesthetic of exhaustion”: rust, patina, scuffs, chemical discoloration. These are marks of use, decay, and toxicity. Placing them in the home asserts that beauty isn’t only in the new or the pristine. It can be in the scarred, the burdened, the retired. To keep industrial waste is to refuse its erasure.

Found Objects:
Salvaged timber offcut from Barreiro’s industrial park, Tijolo Ceramico, Grelha Dupla, Industrial patina from industrial park, Reclaimed stone, Ceramic tile, Industrial foam discard