FRAGMENTED SHEET

The Fragmented Sheet is an artifact and a character in a story that investigates how the action of collectively embroidering and overflowing the labor movements of workers and former workers at Coelima can become a critical agency to narrate and map frontier stories experienced at the factory. Here, the Fragmented Sheet, a trousseau piece donated by a former worker and produced at Coelima, serves as a critical artifact to rethink ways of debating and making visible questions about freedom and constraint of movement within the factory, as well as limits created by invisible systems or pre-established labor monitoring plans. The act of embroidering serves to map the spatial movements of workers and former workers between house and factory, demonstrating that distinct labor hierarchies cause unequal boundaries between workers in accessing different sectors of production. If the factory is here seen, accessed, experienced subjectively and positioned according to circumstances of power, how can and should it be represented? The open and unfinished act of overflowing or flooding unknown parts of the factory, not accessed or not perceptible in the imagination of certain hierarchies or work positions, challenges fixed and deterministic acts of architectural mapping. It proposes, instead, another way of evoking imaginary perceptions following a process that is open, unfinished and collective and that simultaneously maps, narrates and renegotiates the disparate ways in which the factory is still experienced and accessed today. Perhaps, critical evidence is prescribed for a history of future perception, in which Coelima itself may reappear in the access of the individual body, in the intersubjective vision and in the collective memory.

Fernando P. Ferreira, 2021