A Women's Federation Director
Li Xiaofei
李消非
Production date
2011
Object Detail
Media
video (colour, sound)
Measurements
6 min 10 sec
Notes
Since 2010, Li Xiaofei has been examining the phenomenon of mass production and its impact on social structures and the individual, within and beyond China. In his continuing Assembly Line Project, he has visited factories in southern China and throughout the world. Filming interviews with workers, supervisors and managers, Li has engaged with the reality of mechanisation, exploring the subject of labour and capital in original ways. Themes that emerge from this ambitious ongoing project include relationships between workers and management, between humans and machines, and between individuals and the larger society. Matter-of-fact discussions of pay and working conditions are constantly broken up in his videos by the roar of machinery, and the visually rich imagery of the assembly line, the rotation of gears and wheels, and spinning machine parts. Li Xiaofei raises many questions about the nature of work in the modern world.A Women’s Federation Director (2011) explicitly links these private and public worlds. A woman working in a factory that produces laminated flooring explains how, after graduating from high school, she worked in a village as a director for the All China Women’s Federation, a government organisation focused on women’s issues including reproductive health: part of her job was to police the rigorously enforced One Child Policy. She talks about bringing women in to the clinic to have intra-uterine devices fitted, about the difficulties faced by migrant workers without a residency permit, and about how she wants to do her job in the factory as well as possible. She says, ‘Sometimes I think, “Why should a woman be so tired?”’ Her responses, interspersed with the busy factory and its unceasing production, suggest a connection between the economic policies of urbanisation and industrialisation, and social policies that control every aspect of the lives of Chinese citizens, including the production of children. Her biggest dream, she says, is to educate her daughter well.
Accession number
2012.057