The Breathing Factory

About The Exhibition

Belfast Exposed Photography was pleased to present The Breathing Factory, a new body of work by Mark Curran in April and May 2006. The Breathing Factory critically surveys the working environment of the multinational corporation Hewlett-Packard (HP), located on the former site of a meatpacking factory in Leixlip, County Kildare. The site is 2 million square feet in size with almost 2,500 workers and is HP's only inkjet manufacturing plant in Europe and one of the only 3 such global locations. HP is the largest Information and Communication Technology employer in Ireland and is one of a number of American high tech companies (Microsoft, Intel) whose low-corporation-tax presence in Ireland contributed to the 'Celtic Tiger' boom of the 1990s. Without going through a process of significant industrialization (IDA Ireland), the Irish (agriculture-based) economy has been transformed into a highly globalized, 'post-industrial' model. In his catalogue essay for The Breathing Factory, Sean O'Riain describes how Curran's photographs give us an unusual insight into what are surprisingly obscure workplaces, the modern manufacturing plants that circle Dublin city, the icons within the new cathedrals of high tech industrial parks'. The Breathing Factory allows us to see beyond the smooth images of corporate working life that emanate from centralized branding systems, into a world governed by the market. A world where working hours and working conditions must become flexible. Not only at the factory level. The new "breathing rhythm" must also make headway at the social level: the time rhythm in society, the labour market, the educational system and the remaining institutions of the welfare state'. (Hartz, 1996)

The Project
Mark Curran spent 9 months negotiating access to the Hewlett-Packard Technology Campus. The project began in April 2003 and was produced over a 20 month period. Each site visit was pre-scheduled and cleared by security and he was accompanied on site at all times. All material collated was vetted and Curran has made this 'policing process' visible in the work, as a comment on the way that global capital investment is a highly managed and protected process. The Breathing Factory has been developed as a cross-disciplinary project involving the application of ethnographic practices and techniques. Curran conducted interviews with a range of staff including the Director of Government and Public Affairs, a Logistics Coordinator, the Vice-President and General Manager, a Production Supervisor, a Clean Room Supervisor and a Health and Safety Inspector, among others. Transcribed excerpts from these interviews have been incorporated into the final installation and publication. Curran has also produced a series of photographs and digital video work surveying this new and transient landscape. O'Riain describes how in Curran's photographs, we are presented with a worker in a uniform, a controlled body in a bland space but how local and global relationships combine gender, ethnicity, family, sport, national loyalties, friendships, religion and even personalities peek through the neutral expressions, plastic, and grey-blue and white of Curran's portraits'. He identifies how workers in cubicles create personal spaces and how 'the standardization of the physical plant only highlights the human and social diversity'.

The Installation
Interview excerpts on architect's paper, large-format photographic portraits and interior images are presented amidst the ambient low hiss of an audio-visual projection. The photographs are presented unframed and unmounted, in a suspended and fragile state. Curran creates an installation that evokes the homogenous and globally proliferated spaces of new, 'high tech' labour practices. The Belfast Exposed gallery, itself the site of a former, Victorian shirt factory becomes a house of ghosts, surveying a future prospect.

The Book
The Breathing Factory is published by Edition Braus and Belfast Exposed Photography (ISBN No. 3-89904-216-6). It is a hardback edition with 180 pages and 69 colour photographs. Essays have been commissioned by Sean O Riain, Chair of the Sociology Department, National University of Ireland, Maynooth and author of The Politics of High Tech Growth: Developmental States in the Global Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Martin McCabe, lecturer and Programme Chair of the BA Photography, School of Media and researcher within the centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice in the Dublin Institute of Technology.