3. 4. – 9. 5. 2025

Photographer and media artist Anna Fabricius has been researching the changing cultural and personality-shaping role of work for years. In this project, she explores the functioning of transnational family relationships, which are increasingly common as a result of the global division of labour. Over the past year, she has collaborated with workers from the Far East, employed in agriculture or process manufacturing. The majority of them are young, poor men and women whose daily lives are characterised by contractually restricted freedom of movement, strict daily schedules and low wages.

Foreign workers neither benefit from the public services nor the care of either their temporary place of residence or their homeland. Their temporarily stationary lives are characterised by abandonment, lack of safety, support and regeneration. Their social and emotional wellbeing (or deprivation) depends on their ability to organise themselves into groups. Collective self-care bears the potential of experiencing belonging and love, peer relationships and individual freedom.

The internet and smartphone are indispensable tools for staying in touch. These devices are also used to make transfers home, translate between languages or obtain information about their current and distant homelands, while for years their presence in their families back home is merely virtual. Collaboration with the labourers, Fabricius physically recreates (cut outs from special material) those digital gestures what family members drew onto the digital/mobile selfies. With the act of making these photos she recreates exactly the tactility between the labourers and the beloved one. In one hand the “gestures” get into the same
space, on the other hand some parts of the body are covered/hidden.

In this project the invisibility is one of the key words as significant part of their life. Fabricius’ works map the movement of the people and their messages, demonstrating the significance of such notions as acceptance, sense of absence, love of family and responsibility. They reflect on the role of photographs on today’s society and shed new light on the lives of worker communities at a time when new forms and networks of global employment are under development in our region.

By Judit Csatlos

Exhibition supported by: