“Je cherche du travail, pour une journee”. Black leather shoes, a black pencil skirt. “Je veux travailler bénévolement, j’ai diverse competénces”. White shirt, a feminine collar. “Et je suis fiable”. Hair neatly pinned, stockings: all the finishing touches.
The only person to respond to Victoria Wigzell’s embodied personal add is M. Gasser: a Valaisan construction company CEO, and the formal employer of xx men. In meeting with him on site, Ms Wigzell would skip the office attire, would wave goodbye to the hand familiarly poised over the fax machine receiver, and don the grey jeans and heavy duty shoes of physical work. No longer the office dolly, Ms Wigzell is still not quite yet in the fluorescent overalls that form the construction workers uniform apparel. A tripod slung over one shoulder and a rolling camera capturing the gestures of the other hand: she is surely engaged in the production of the aesthetics that tantalise audiences receptive to the work of art.
It was in this capacity that she would find herself alongside the workers, listening while they whittled away in order to ease the heavy loads of full working days and masonry. Singing while working is a tradition the Valais mountains are quite accustomed to, albeit less so when the songs are Portuguese.
“You bring back the harvest”. Tenor, alto. “Singing the paths of the vines, climbing the old walls”. Bass. These words are proudly sung out not by the workers, but by the choir in which M. Gasser participates, filling the construction site and setting to task the crew of sound and video that Ms Wigzell had enlisted and prepped weeks before. The site of toil and struggle, the place of fraternity, camaraderie and duty. The aural labour of leisure time in this Catholic region of Switzerland exalts the praxis of the blue collar worker, and offers to it the patina of romanticism not quite won over by Gustav Courbet. The heroism of these words also extend to labour the dialectic of its own fetishism. The honest days’ work, that starts when it starts and ends when it ends, the symbolic construction of humanity’s progress. It is precisely this kind of fetishism that index’s the stereotypical business entity who ideologically surmises: I work hard for my money.
Text: Madeleine Dymond
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