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Homage to the Hohner Family … and to the Accordion Installation, 2003 Oil shale on paper, stacked, at the electrical switch box / former boiler house Geist Kohle Arbeit – Spirit/Mind Coal Work Text by Andreas Mayer-Brennenstuhl, Honorary Professor, Fachhochschule für Gestaltung (College of Design), Schwäbisch Hall ‘Geist Kohle Arbeit’ is the title of an exhibition in the former boiler house of the Hohner mouth organ and accordion factory in Trossingen, which includes Barbara Karsch-Chaïeb’s installation with local reference, ‘Homage to the Hohner Family … and to the Accordion’. The exhibition venue has a life of its own and conveys a sense of history. The best way to respond to it as an artist is to live into it and to treat it with respect. The current exhibition achieves this to a large extent. Responding to a dominant environment is best done with small-scale, at times almost unnoticeable details. Visitors are therefore called to search for and track down hidden, unprepossessing aspects. Barbara Karsch-Chaïeb’s ‘Hohner’ installation refers to technical remains in the factory’s transformer station, i.e. the electrical switch boxes. In preparation for her design, the artist studied systems of transformation, albeit in her very own specific way, questioning the problem of time, of transience. Up till now, Barbara Karsch-Chaïeb has mostly worked with schist and oil shale, geological materials which contain a particularly large number of fossils – information from the dawn of creation, so to speak. Here, the artist created her own fossils, first exploring the history of the place and then ‘fossilizing’ the historic documents she found, using a paste of shale she made herself. The things she found during her ventures into the factory interior also represent interesting documents of transience and of the transitory meaning of the term ‘work’. The items shown here document the work ethos applied in a family enterprise at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Perhaps some visitors to this exhibition knew the Hohner factory in earlier times, maybe even from their own experience, and would certainly confirm that working then was a different experience – positively or negatively – from what it is today. Today’s notion of work describes a form of alienation from a meaningful, productive activity not only on the assembly line, but also at management level – in an automatic obedience to anonymous ‘inherent necessities’ in the wake of the magic word ‘shareholder value’. This is a central cause of today’s cultural crisis. The fact that our awareness of and thinking about the subject of labour is the key to a humane organization of the world of employment is expressed in the exhibition title ‘Spirit/Mind Coal Work’. The shift lever for the transformation of present set-ups is not made of metal, but consists of a ‘revolution in mindset’. It is in our minds that we can change the meaning of work to bring about changes towards more humanity in our working environments and people’s social circumstances. With the necessary artistic openness Barbara Karsch-Chaïeb has searched for and registered traces of past working environments and offers us a space for thought and experience, which reveals our definition of work as historically established and therefore relative, criticisable and needing change. Barbara Karsch-Chaïeb’s strategy is to point out developments from the past, their results and remains, opening our eyes to possibilities, potentials and the certainty that things could be different. Art cannot and is not obliged to do more than that. Everything else should follow quite naturally, even – possibly – the suggested transformation.