Ahmet Öğüt

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Workers Taking Over the Factory

2015
8mm film installation, video documentation, t-shirts for guides
in collaboration with Ozgur Kazova: Workers Self-managed Textile Cooperative
commissioned by the 13th Biennale de Lyon


Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory in Lyon, shot in Lyon in 1895, was the first film in the history of the cinema. The 120th anniversary of its making was celebrated at the very place where the Lumiere brothers had placed their camera - now the Institut Lumiere. On 19 March 2015, three thousand people played the parts of the workers coming out of the factory; Ahmet Öğüt took advantage of the event to ask some of them to come out carrying logos of workers self-managed factories (autogestion) In Öğüt’s installation, the sewing machines, which were used as stands for the viewers for looking at the images shot in Lyon, hark back to this history, as do the T-shirts designed for the Biennale guides, produced by Ozgur Kazova: Workers Self-managed Textile Cooperative that emerged as one of the most precious legacies from the 2013 May-June Taksim Gezi Park resistance and labour struggles. T-shirts have "100 percent product without a boss" printed on them.

Workers taking over the factory

8mm Film No.1:

Current workers entering the Institut Lumiere

8mm Film No.2:

Logos of some of the current Worker's Self-Management
(autogestion) movements

Including;
Ozgur Kazova (Turkey)
Les Ateliers (France)
Fonderie de l'Aisne (France)
Voi.Me. (Greece)

Both filmed on the day of 120 years anniversary of the first film
"Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory"
by the Lumiere brothers at the same location (Institut Lumiere)

commissioned by the 13th Biennale de Lyon

Special Thanks to

Asena Hayal, Ezgi Bakcay,
Ralph Rugoff, Frederique Gautier,
Thierry Raspail, Thierry Prat, Alexandra Chopin,
Institut Lumiere and Ozgur Kazova


installation view | photo courtesy by Blaise Adilon





T-shirts for all the guides of the 13th Biennale de Lyon produced by Ozgur Kazova Workers Self-managed Textile Cooperative that emerged as one of the most precious legacies from the 2013 May-June Taksim Gezi Park resistance and labour struggles.