Multimedia installation (2013/2021)
& 2 public Research-Moments 20.11. 14-16h/21.11. 18-19h (for more info scroll down)
In “A Fabric in Turkey Red” (Karlsruhe, 2020) Romy Rüegger links questions about the conditions of factory work to the colonial legacy of early rural-alpine textile industries in Glarus, placing them in the context of global colonial and postcolonial economies of trade and knowledge. The bright red printed cotton track, imprinted with images and texts from her research, allude to early “treadmills” and factory processes.
Applied as a foil is a print motif described as a “Turkish red cloth with a Far Eastern pattern”, which the artist understands as one of many actors and voices in her research. The dating and location of the motif coincides with the first factory workers’ strike in Europe, which took place in Glarus in 1837. The workers – according to the statistics, it was mainly women and children – protested against the introduction of fixed working hours, which made it impossible for them to maintain their routines and sometimes unpredictable events of reproduction, stable and home work, which were linked to daylight and the seasons. The work sees itself as a feminist reading of this strike.
Also to be heard is a sound archaeology in which Don’t DJ interprets the bpm data Romy Rüegger found on the work processes in the Glarus textile factories, at the artist’s invitation for the exhibition hall (Romy Rüegger, “The Moving Body, The Listening Body, Moving through Wires of Wind”, Karlsruhe 2020), understanding the exhibition space as a sound body and non-responsive echo chamber.
Public research moments: 20.11. 14-16h/21.11. 18-19h
During her two-week research phase, Romy will begin a new, still completely open-ended research under the working title “Silk Roads”. The artist will visit places of urban and rural, historical and current silk production, mulberry farmers, archives, people and places of related colonial legacies and presences. There will be two public research moments during these two weeks:
On Sunday November 21, Rüegger will report on her research regarding textile- and silk-production.
Supported by: Canton Zurich Fine Arts, Ernst Göhner Foundation, Ernst & Olga Gubler-Hablützel Foundation, Erna and Curt Burgauer Foundation.
Romy Rüegger is a visual artist. Her installations, performances, audio works and texts deal with questions of non-linear time, body and embodiment, social spaces and natural resources, and voids and representation in the narratives and readings of our present. Language, montage, and reduction are aesthetic devices she uses to populate settings for performances with voices, props, visual sketches, and also reconstructions of architectural and scenic elements. From this composition, artistic spaces emerge that deal with the language of things and words and their social spaces. Romy Rüegger has taught performance and visual arts at art schools in Berlin, Munich, Zurich and Milan. In 2018, ten of her performance scripts were published in an artist monograph by Archive Books in Berlin. In 2018, she was also a fellow at Gasworks in London. In 2020 to 2021, her current works were shown in a comprehensive solo exhibition at the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe. In 2021 she is a member of the jury of the Swiss Performance Prize. She lives and works in Zurich and Berlin. www.farfar.ch
