“Three employees of a foundry meet up with themselves in an abandoned quarry in Charente. Affected by work, the workers remember the sequence of the gestures that they do every day.”
Opus is the work and the task at hand, but it’s also the word we use for musical composition. We see three workers who interpret a series of movements, movements they know since they are those of their work. They have no benchmarks, no workbenches, and had to use their body memories and instinctive to perform the sequence of gestures. These workers perform in an abandoned quarry, a symbol of a neglected, forgotten, and disappeared job. This performance is a way to preserve the culture of gesture and know-how which may disappear. It’s sort of a tribute to workers’ work and the memory of culture industrial. Τhis disappearance of the gesture is also linked to robotization. Between the harsh reality of factory work and the fabrications on the technology, an ambiguous relationship between the robot and its creators.
