Enacting Experience:
Learning from Labor Processes

Workshop III

“Enacting Experience: Learning from Labor Processes” comprises two workshops and a conversation that explore the textile industry through contemporary and historical perspectives on labor, working conditions, environmental impacts, and colonial legacies.

Expanding on the relationship between production, the body, and space explored in the exhibition No Admittance Except on Business, the program focuses on everyday factory practices and stories through workers’ embodied and social experiences across two distinct historical and geographical contexts. It features two workshops—“Out of the Gears” led by Vivien Tauchmann and İzel Karaca, and “Factory Girls” led by Frida Hållander and Åsa Dybwad Norman—alongside presentations introducing their respective practices. These are followed by a conversation moderated by Eylül Şenses and Magnus Ericson.

Organized in conjunction with the exhibition No Admittance Except on Business and as part of Practice Matters, this free-admission event is a collaboration between IASPIS and Salt, and is programmed by Magnus Ericson and Eylül Şenses.

PROGRAM

15.00 Workshop: Out of the Gears
Vivien Tauchmann, İzel Karaca

Vivien Tauchmann’s ongoing research project Out of the Gears examines the labor exploitation, environmental degradation, and colonial legacies concealed behind denim’s associations with freedom and its ubiquity in everyday life. Developed through field research in Turkey’s denim industry and collaboration with Clean Clothes Campaign Turkey, the project explores the material, sensory, and emotional conditions of production. 

Led by Tauchmann together with İzel Karaca, the workshop invites participants to engage with the gestures, rhythms, and forms of resistance embedded in industrial denim production through choreographed movement sequences, audiovisual guidance, and collective reflection. It foregrounds embodied knowledge and interdependence, creating space to explore how care and solidarity might reshape relations between bodies, labor, and the environment. The workshop will be followed by a presentation introducing Tauchmann’s broader practice.

Participation in this workshop is limited to 20 people. The program will be held in English and Turkish. Participants are expected to bring a pair of jeans. Both the workshop and the presentation are also open to all who wish to attend as observers. Click here to register. 

16.30 Workshop: Factory Girls
Åsa Dybwad Norman, Frida Hållander

Collaborating on various projects since 2016, Åsa Dybwad Norman and Frida Hållander explore the textile industry and the lives and agency of textile workers and “factory girls” throughout history. Bringing together practices and media such as embroidery, appliqué, sculpture, and video, the duo creates spaces for critical reflection on textile production and the relationships between labor, production, and power.

Their 2026 publication Fabriksflickorna [Factory Girls] revolves around an adapted version of the 1980 play Fabriksflickorna – makten och härligheten [Factory Girls: The Power and Glory] by Swedish artists and playwrights Suzanne Osten and Margareta Garpe. The play, together with its extensive documentation, provides a glimpse into the Swedish textile crisis and the restructuring process that, from the 1950s onward, led to shutdowns and the relocation of large parts of Sweden’s textile production. The duo’s 2022 collage film Vi strömmar ut från fabriken [We Flow Out of the Factory] also draws on the play.

Building on these works, the workshop invites participants to take part in a reading of selected scenes from the play. The reading will be followed by a presentation in which the artists will share experiences and reflections from their past and ongoing projects. The workshop and presentation are open to everyone and will be held in English.

17.30 Conversation
Åsa Dybwad Norman, Frida Hållander, Vivien Tauchmann, Magnus Ericson, Eylül Şenses

Åsa Dybwad Norman is a textile artist and Senior Lecturer in Textile Art at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. Based in Arvika, Sweden, she explores how the knowledge of the hand and body manifests in contemporary society, often examining historical spaces and events through archival research, interviews, and artistic processes. Her practice is characterized by an interest in the movement of textile materials across time and place, with a focus on their subversive potential. Since 2024, she has been collaborating with curator and maker Benjamin Lignel on See Me Make, Make Me See, an ongoing transnational project to develop a toolbox for looking, talking, and writing about contemporary craft.

Frida Hållander is an artist, researcher, and educator at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden. She is a researcher in Textile Heritage (2025–2030), an artistic research project at Konstfack funded by the Swedish Research Council. The project aims to build knowledge about the historical and contemporary role of textiles, make textile experiences visible, and establish a research environment that contributes to the knowledge exchange between institutions and with the surrounding community. She is also part of the artistic project Mould of Stories (2026-2028), examining a large collection of plaster moulds from the Upsala-Ekeby ceramic factory founded in 1886. The project asks how industrial histories persist materially and how the residues of past production continue to shape relationships between human bodies and their environments.

İzel Karaca is a researcher, writer, and editor bridging the fields of sociology, art, and critical theory. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, examining performance art through the lens of postcolonial theory and critical readings of Turkey’s sociopolitical environment.

Vivien Tauchmann is an independent designer, movement artist, educator, and researcher investigating sociopolitical relations through embodied approaches. Working at the intersection of relational design, performative arts, and somatic pedagogies, her practice seeks to confront aspects of human-made infrastructures and subvert processes that sustain power dynamics and injustice. She collaborates with grassroots initiatives and a diverse range of cultural spaces. Since 2015, she has been active as an organizer and campaigner in the international labor rights network of Clean Clothes Campaign Turkey. She is also part of In Figuring Out, a collective focused on embodied knowledge in design practice and research, and a co-founder of STRÜKTÜR, a Berlin-based association supporting arts and artists from the geography of Turkey.