Welcome to the 33rd issue of The Funambulist. Although our issues have always been edited in an anti-capitalist spirit, this may be the first one to approach directly this gigantic machine of land and labor exploitation. The urgency that characterizes our will to dedicate an issue to a specific topic came last summer, whilst watching Stan Neumann’s film The Time of the Workers (2020) for the French-German TV channel, Arte. In it, one affirmation in particular opened my eyes to a connection that I had so far missed. Interviewed in a formal rural hamlet of the Scottish Highlands, social historian Arthur McIvor explains that in the 18th and 19th centuries, the working class was formed from farmers who had been subjected to the political process of “clearances.” These “clearances” consisted of a rationalization of agriculture, which involved the violent eviction of farmers from their land and the destruction of their homes. Such a rationalization was made to profit families and clans who have made a fortune out of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the plantations in colonized Carribeans and North America. The largest industrialized system of dispossession and transcontinental deportation of millions of Africans in history is thus directly connected to the making of the British working class whose exploited labor will be used for the industrial revolution.
This issue, remarkably, does count a single historical analysis of labor. Rather, it focuses on present accounts (for several of them, from laborers themselves) of labor exploitation and resistance in relation to their respective geographical location. Such an editorial choice does not forget the roots of globalized exploitation that finds its paroxysm of violence within modern slavery. It does not forget either the crucial role played by architecture to organize bodies in space in relation to their positions in racial capitalism. From the design of slave ships and plantations without which the trans-Atlantic slave trade simply would not have been possible, to the architecture of factories, offices, as well as construction sites, the spaces of labor are in no way neutral to the conditions in which they are actualized.
Construction sites, Offices, and Universities ///
This issue only touches on a few of these spaces: the factory, the field, the hospital, the home, the prison, the sex work room, the hotel, and the maquiladora. Considered for this issue, yet notably missing from it are the spaces of the construction site, the office, and the university. We therefore ought to talk about them here.
Construction sites are often overlooked as spaces of racialized labor, exploitation, and resistance. In 2014, Zaha Hadid was criticized for her affirmation that it was not her “duty as an architect” to prevent the numerous deaths of South Asian workers on the construction site of the stadium that her office designed for the 2022 Qatar World Cup. She was merely making explicit what the vast majority of architects are thinking, or rather, not thinking about. Similarly, the industrialized death machine that states such as Qatar or the United Arab Emirates have created with the Kafala — a system examined by Gemma Justo and Ghiwa Sayegh in this issue — for the construction industry is only the most extreme form of systematized violence and hardship that exists today in most construction sites of the world. In addition to the crushing impact that construction has on bodies, the laborers themselves are often kept in administrative limbo regarding their lives in a country of which they are generally not citizens. In February 2020, we had to write a letter (co-signed by 258 architects and non-architects) to world-renowned architecture office Snohetta about the political struggle that was happening on one of “their” construction sites in Paris — the new headquarters of Le Monde. The site was occupied day and night by 30 undocumented workers from Mali, Mauritania, Guinea, and Ivory Coast, as well as their supporters and representatives of their union. The workers had been asked to work outside of labor code regulations, had a part of their salaries stolen, and were not given the pay stubs necessary to regularize their administrative status. The Oslo-based architects were thus enjoined to add to the pressure on the French construction company, which was in turn forced to negotiate the end of the occupation. On the other side of the ocean, a collective called Who Builds Your Architecture attempts to make architects accountable for the labor conditions on the construction sites on which their design is taking shape. One of their members, Mabel O. Wilson has dedicated part of her work to the historical analysis of constructing the capital city of the U.S. settler colony, whose main buildings, including the White House itself, was built by enslaved labor.
In de-industrialized societies, the office is often considered as the paradigmatic space of labor. Its spatial schemes can be analyzed to demonstrate how productivity is being optimized and surveillance is implemented. The images of the countless desks and their docile workers in Orson Welles’ cinematographic adaptation of The Trial (1962), or the semi-height work boxes of Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967) come to mind. Closer to us, what we may call “the Google model” extends the amount of hours spent at the office by creating a working space complemented by various leisures or other activities deemed as “care-oriented.” Besides the spatial organization of the office, its very materials are to be considered as well. In Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty (2006), Michelle Murphy investigates a disease created by chemical exposure with various toxic materials contained within architecture itself. This disease is only experienced by female workers, adding another layer to the gendered dimension of labor exploitation. However, besides being a site of labor for the various layers of the middle class, the office is also the space of invisibilized labor practiced by gendered and racialized groups of cleaning workers. The toxicity that makes their body sick in their case is not contained in the carpet or the walls, but in the products they are forced to use every evening or every morning when office workers are at home, as Françoise Vergès points out in A Decolonial Feminism (2019). We will see in this issue how what is true for the office is even more intensely true for the hotel, in a conversation with the Ibis Batignolles strikers in Paris.
As for the university, we can turn to Sara Ahmed to examine it. On June 5, 2019, I was lucky to attend a lecture where she presented her then-forthcoming book What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use. Gathered in a relatively small crowd and listening to her description of a series of violent encounters and sustained exploitations of precarious, women academic workers in the setting of the university resonated with many of us. One story particularly struck me for its architectural implications. Ahmed was describing a situation where a male academic administrator was terrorizing a female subordinate while blocking the door of his office. If the door had swung the other way, the person subjected to this violence would have been able to escape. Of course, the problem here is not an architectural one per se: it is the violence of hetero-patriarchy that is at work. Nonetheless, the physical opaque formation that encloses space into what we commonly call “a room” — sanctioned by a unique access and therefore exit — is an architectural typology complicit with this system, which ought to be interrogated.
Strikes, Sabotages, and “Wigs” ///
Exploitation never comes without resistance and, in the context of spaces of labor, this issue illustrates that it comes in many forms. The term “sabotage” now commonly used for any sort of voluntary destruction of one component within a compromised infrastructure, originates from the realm of the factory. In 19th century France, sabotage required placing one’s wooden clog (sabot in French) into the cogs of a machine, leading to its dysfunctioning, or even its breakage. In England, the luddite movement beginning with the destruction of new textile machines that replaced human labor is another example of how a regional rebellion was suppressed with murderous violence.
Strikes remain powerful embodiments of resistance against labor exploitation as the Ibis Hotel strikers as well as Prii Sen remind us in this issue. Whether sustained for a few days or several months, they fundamentally alter the course of exploitation. Strikes are not merely the refusal of work, they are also spatialized through protests and occupations. After many factories were forced to cease their activities following the 2001 economic crisis in Argentina, such occupations were systematized. Organized under the banner of the fábricas recuperadas (reclaimed factories), they developed an alternative to the capitalist and hierarchical mode of production. The architecture of the Zanon ceramic tile factory (Neuquen), the Brukman textile factory and the Hotel Bauen (Buenos Aires) recounts such alternatives, as well as the survival and defensive means that needed to emerge in order to resist the various forces deployed against them.
“FASINPAT,” i.e. Fabrica Sin Patrones (Factory Without Bosses), the Zanon ceramic factory in Neuquen, Argentina, reclaimed by its workers in 2001. / Both photos by Guglielmo Celata (2005).Some forms of resistance take a less direct form. This is particularly the case in factories, where workers at times “seize the means of production” to repair or produce workers’ own belongings. Since the 17th century, French workers have called this furtive reclaiming “perruque” (wig) to insist upon the fugitive dimension of this action. “Wigs” at times consist of repairing a broken object with factory machines. Other times, it is an over-production of the product fabricated in the factory specifically for the workers’ use. In other situations, such a reappropriation can serve directly a strike or political struggle (particularly in the printer industry). But often, a “wig” is as simple as a useless object, which takes its political dimension in the mere fact that it was fabricated with the intention to reclaim the means of production.
Conclusion ///
Although space is the primal dimension of this issue’s analysis; time would have been just as much relevant to examine the settings of exploitation and resistance in relation to labor. It will therefore be the main object of one of our 2021 issues. Similarly the gendered, classed, and racialized (in the Global North, but also very much in the Global South) dimensions of labor could have been made more explicit in our title and this introduction; yet you will see that they are at the core of each of the following contributions. With that said, I wish you an excellent read of our first 2021 issue. ■
Léopold Lambert is the editor-in-chief of The Funambulist. He is a trained architect living in Paris and the author of three books about the inherent violence of architecture, in particular in Palestine. His next book is entitled States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum (PMN, 2021). Read more on his contributor page.