ABSTRACT
Deformative, Yet Silent casts ‘work.’ The casted artifacts discussed herein foreground the tension between work and labor in design fields by depicting the silent deterioration of material bodies. The indefinite distinction between work and labor implicates masking, silencing and concealment. Enduring reciprocal deformation and reformation, the parties at ‘work’ - that is, the body of a designer as well as the design instruments - ultimately exhibit the tensile fringes between work and labor. After all, excessive repeated movements or prolonged stillness result in visible anomalies and decay of the productive body. Through exaggeration, juxtaposition and affixation, a collection of casted artifacts emphasizes the everyday material encounter between the flesh of the body and the inert corpus of design instruments. These artifacts, thereby, amplify the categorical embodiment of work and labor in material bodies, and in so doing, aim to challenge indeterminate denotation of work and labor in design fields, broadly, and in the discipline of architecture and its professional practice, specifically.
