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The Afterlife of Working Gloves and why Mother Nature doesn’t wear them

eteam

2017 00:25:35 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD video
Tags:
City, Conceptual Art, Consumer culture, Documentation, Environment, Labor, Landscape, Literature, Nature, Photography

Description

For over two years we made it our business to document abandoned working gloves on the streets of NYC. The feelings and thoughts that surrounded this activity connected to the ways his family relates to Gregor Samsa as a cockroach, or whatever Franz Kafka intended him to be in The Metamorphosis after his transformation from a productive citizen to a useless insect. When Gregor can't grant them a comfortable life-style any longer, his family starts to resent and hate the once loved and respected provider, finds him disgusting.

The daily ritual of documenting discarded working gloves gave form to the disappointment, anger and surprise of perceiving something as being treated unfairly. We started to rely on the gloves as “actual evidence”, read them as fall-out of the resentment, injustice, anxiety and destruction that was in the air. We took about 1,200 photographs and produced a video through which we tried to understand if this “fall-out” was part of a natural trajectory, historically speaking. We approached the question formally by comparing the shapes, textures and colors with compositions in nature.

— eteam

eteam uses video, performance, installation and writing to instigate and articulate encounters at the edges of diverging cultural, technical and aesthetic universes. Through their artistic practice eteam finds ways to collaborate with people who operate on the edges of mainstream culture and the marketplace. They are drawn to those willing to experiment, cross genres and cultural boundaries, together we forge proximity and make visible the interconnections we humans share with land, animals, plants, ghosts, deities and objects. Practicing art is their way to enter the “outside,” pay close attention to the details, while trying to understand the whole.

eteam’s narratives have screened internationally in video- and film festivals, they lectured in universities, presented in art galleries and museums and performed in the desert, on fields, in caves in ships, black box theaters and horse-drawn wagons.

They could not have done this without the support of Creative Capital and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Art in General, NYSCA, NYFA, Rhizome, CLUI, Taipei Artist Village, Eyebeam, Smack Mellon, Yaddo and MacDowell, the City College of New York, the Academy of Visual Art HKBU and the Fulbright Scholar Program, among many others. Their novel Grabeland was published by Nightboat Books in February 2020.

They received to Fulbright Scholarships to research the relationship between traditional puppetry and digital smart phones in Taiwan.

Also available from eteam is the book Buzz Cut