Social dialogue

artist residency and exhibition

LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial

Social Dialogue is a sound instalation by Lorena Lozano (direction) and Juanjo Palacios (sound design), based on research by Mona Aranea. It offers an artistic vision of the industrial sector while enhancing the process of knowledge transfer from academic research into society.

Nowadays we witness the decline of heavy industry and the rise of a new city model based on culture as capital. This transition to a post-industrial and computerised society needs knowledge spaces bound to identity and place. The installation amplifies the words of trade unionists, workers and managers of the steel industry and financial companies in Germany, Belgium and Spain. The recordings are interviews made by researcher Mona Aranea for her PhD (2013-2016).

The speakers evoke the factory and the control architecture, while the testimonies manifest problems such as the closure of factories, offshoring, the crisis of industrial democracy models and the fragmentation of labour collective identities. They define metallurgy as a manufactured activity in which the production of the same amount of steel imposes greater and greater cost. As an environmental big scale process, it depends on the natural limits of resources and the irreversibility of energy and climate. Their voices conform a polyphony of the world of industry that reveals the difficulties to find consensus.