1. WASTELANDS

At De Fabriek, an experimental art space in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, the sound of one lone machine leaves a haunting echo. In a former factory hall, a single industrial embroidery machine runs continuously, its repetitive rhythm filling the empty space. Around it stand empty husks of clothing, upright yet unsupported by human bodies. 

The machine works without rest, indifferent to the absence of workers, or even visitors, within the space. It is producing embroidered images of the factory hall when it was filled with workers. Stacks of paper are scattered throughout the space, holding up the embroidered results of the machine’s labor. Malaysian artist Marcos Kueh’s installation On Time¹ creates the uneasy sensation of production continuing after people have gone. This new installation forces us to find new modes of engaging with (the histories of) production.

“Against the backdrop of a wasteful, uneconomic natural world, mankind’s only resource is to work its way through dissipation and loss. … All lifeworlds laid to waste will ultimately serve a higher purpose: to stave off entropy. … The energies of nature … offer human beings the wondrous opportunity to convert them into industry. Failure to do so is not only uneconomic, it is arguably sinful. … It is mankind’s duty to put resources to work in order to avoid them going to ‘waste’.’’²

Tracing the links between fossil-fuelled industrial systems and global racial and imperial domination, Ana Teixeira Pinto paints a grim picture. She shows how the hegemony and “advancement” of Western scientific thought, specifically the theories of thermodynamics and entropy in physics introduced in the mid-1800s, have shaped social and natural environments. With the introduction of these concepts into the Western epistemological canon came a new definition of waste: unused resources are irreversibly lost. The natural world is full of energy waiting to be tapped. Not using it quickly, on a large scale, and as efficiently as possible is framed as a waste of resources and lost potential. 

The spread of this thinking into social and economic theory coincided with the height of the Industrial Revolution. Industrial cities rapidly expanded across Europe. Raw resources were extracted from colonies worldwide and transported to European factories, leaving a trail of ecological destruction and widespread ecosystem collapse. Overworked and underpaid laborers processed these resources into goods that were then sold back to them, forced to spend their little earnings on an endless cycle of production and consumption. Global systems of “efficient” production spread their tentacles across the earth, exploiting farmers and producers, enslaved people, factory workers everywhere, not to mention the land and her resources. Factories were constructed at warp speed, forming the centerpiece of new, crowded European industrial cities. 

These industrial logics of extraction, waste, and technological efficiency not only shaped European industrialization but also transformed ecological landscapes in Southeast Asia. Colonial and postcolonial resource extraction - whether rubber, timber, palm oil, minerals, or human labor - disrupted local ecosystems and reconfigured labor relations across the region, embedding industrial logic and productivity into everyday life. These extractive technologies continue to structure labor systems and patterns of environmental precarity in countries such as Malaysia, where industrial production remains entangled with global supply chains. Marcos Kueh’s ongoing research project On Time emerges from within these global histories of labor, time, extraction, production, and the reshaping of human life and our relationship with the natural world.

Today, global production has largely moved from Europe to Asia. This shift, which took place on a large scale over the past fifty or so years, is a symptom of capitalism chasing more favorable labor and resource-extraction conditions under which it can thrive. In Southeast Asia, this has meant the intensification of factory labor, extended working hours, and ongoing ecological strain. Working conditions in factories in Southeast Asia today mirror, and in many cases exceed, those faced by European industrial workers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Despite this move, in cities across Europe, the remains of the industrial past are inescapable: abandoned buildings and factories, populations of unemployed former workers, hopelessness, nostalgia for the glory of times past, polluted rivers, missed potential… everywhere, land which has been wrecked, drained, and then abandoned. We can think of these European cities as post-industrial wastelands.

Eindhoven, where Marcos Kueh developed the installation of On Time at De Fabriek, is a post-industrial wasteland itself. The city has been shaped by successive industries: tobacco, textiles, Philips electronics, and now ASML. Industry has long influenced the lifestyles, economic conditions, and social fabric of its inhabitants.

Marcos was born and raised in Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia, a region profoundly shaped by extractive economies and plantation labor. He moved to the Netherlands seven years ago to train as a graphic designer and textile artist. Much of his career has been spent producing works at Dutch textile mills, including in some of the last operating relics of textile production in the region. Although he usually presents the finished products of factory labor in the form of woven textile installations, his practice is shaped by the physical experience of being on the factory line. As an (Asian) artist and worker in a (European) factory, he began to reflect on global production lines today, both in Europe and in Asia, where factory labor remains an ongoing reality rather than a historical memory. 

Coming from a region long affected by (post)colonial practices of ecological and labor extraction, Marcos’s background informs his awareness of how environmental degradation, labor exploitation, and global systems of power are intertwined across continents. His work speaks not only to European industrial afterlives, but also to contemporary conditions of production in Southeast Asia, where industrial time continues to regulate bodies, landscapes, and lives.

His new research project, On Time, explicitly deals with these themes and brings them to (European) audiences through site-specific installations. It is presented for the first time in the Netherlands at De Fabriek, building on findings from his residency at esea contemporary in Manchester, which resulted in his first institutional solo exhibition, Smooth Sailing, – 路順風.³ On Time examines the role of production by presenting the process of production in the form of a conceptual installation, displaying an industrial embroidery machine in operation as a kinetic sculpture. In Eindhoven, the embroidery machine is presented alongside fabric sculptures by collaborating artist ah Wei ya (Vincent Wong).⁴

Because of global shifts in economy, labor, and production over the past half-century, most people in the West are unaware of how class, privilege, and benefits operate on the factory floor. Today, much of what is consumed in the West is both produced and discarded in the Global South, particularly Southeast Asia, where the environmental consequences of mass consumption are evident both in the ecological costs of industrial production and in the disposal of products deemed waste. Across the UK and Europe, there is a longing to recover what was “lost” when production moved East, and with it the social and cultural systems built around industry. 

What makes this industrial heritage worth saving? How can we justify children running and playing in museums housed in former textile mills when, a century ago, children were put to work under those same machines because their bodies were small enough to fit? Is this the history we want to document, romanticize, and revive?

Concerns about memory and forgetting, especially regarding labor conditions and their effects on workers, can be considered through how artists, cultural workers, and communities engage with what they define as “tradition.” In European post-industrial wasteland cities, the tradition in question is industrial tradition. Malaysian artist and scholar Suleiman Esa has asked the question of how to re-appropriate and interpret the traditions of our past, concluding that “the real task … is not to let tradition be a trap, that would imprison our creativity, stifle our imagination, and suppress our drive for originality and innovativeness.”⁵

2. FEAR OF SERIOUS INJURY

One crucial fact is often forgotten in the revitalization efforts around industrial heritage: the terrible labor conditions faced by workers in industrial factories. The links between the (textile) industry and new ways of arranging the world through the formation of new labor movements and activism, and experiments in social organization and regulation, all emerged from the harsh realities imposed by factory labor. Even Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto (1848), based much of their criticism on observations of the tough working conditions for “spinners, weavers, factory workers and field slaves, whose work and lifeworld reduced their breath and shortened their lives.”⁶

ON TIME

Factory conditions and labor movements have also shaped our way of thinking about something much more insidious: contemporary definitions of time. In Marcos’s research in the UK, for example, he found out that factory workers were routinely given a pocket watch when hired, to prevent them from arriving late or leaving early. The ubiquity of clocks and timekeeping today can be traced back to factory owners’ desire to eliminate any “wasted” labor time.

Clocking in and out became routine for hundreds of thousands of workers and remains so today. In the endless race to increase production, workers endured 16-hour shifts, and many still do around the world. This exploitation led workers to demand limits on working hours. The standardized eight-hour workday is a direct result of factory workers’ fight to reclaim at least one-third of their own time within a day.⁷ While these labor struggles are often narrated as part of European industrial history, industrial temporal regimes persist in contemporary Southeast Asian factories, where long shifts, productivity quotas, and tightly regulated working hours continue to structure everyday life.

In Marcos Kueh’s On Time, the textile machine becomes a tool to think through, fostering reflection on the history of labor and its ties to our own conceptions of time, productivity, and waste. By slowing the speed of production to the machine’s lowest setting (represented by a turtle icon on the user interface), production is pushed to its lower limit. The machine is forced to work against its own design, usually programmed to produce as quickly, efficiently, and abundantly as possible. By decelerating production, the installation invites reflection on industrial energy consumption and the ecological footprint of accelerated manufacturing systems.

3. WHO IS A FACTORY WORKER?

The presentation of this installation in De Fabriek reflects a wider shift in the role of former factory and industrial spaces across European wastelands after they cease to function as sites of production. De Fabriek’s industrial origins remain apparent in both its name and architecture, especially in its long upper hall with an arched roof and factory skylights. The building once housed the bookbinding factory Boekbinderij de Wit (1960–1969)⁸ and later served as storage for the cigar company Philip Morris (1970–1978), before being abandoned. 

In 1980, a group of local artists squatted the empty structure, founding what would become the second-longest-running art space run by and for artists in the Netherlands. What had previously functioned as a site of physical labor and production became a site of intellectual labor, experimentation, and (often conceptual) artistic practice.

WHO “ENJOYS" A FACTORY BUILDING?

In today’s context, those of us engaging with factory buildings as spaces for art, leisure, and entertainment should not forget those difficult histories and the profound effects that such labor had on the lives of those who performed it. Many of us in the West (including visitors to De Fabriek) can now admire 19th- and 20th-century industrial architecture without ever having to experience the conditions of factory labor. The repurposing of factory buildings often comes with gentrification, raising further questions about the impact of cultural spaces within the (often) working-class neighborhoods where factory buildings are found. The ecological afterlives of these sites are also rarely considered: abandoned machinery, residual chemical contamination, and hazardous waste (even if disposed of elsewhere) continue to interact with local ecosystems.

In Marcos’s installation, he temporarily converts De Fabriek back into a space of production, thus reverting the role of the abandoned factory back into a place of machine-led production. The lone embroidery machine runs continuously, programmed to embroider archival images of De Fabriek’s past as a functioning factory full of workers. By continually re-producing this archival evidence, the machine’s output stands in stark contrast to the emptiness and vastness of the space today.

4. EMBROIDERING PRODUCTION

In Rozsika Parker’s 1989 feminist study of embroidery’s histories, she refers to “embroidery’s particular burdensome tradition, the way it was characterized as ‘outside culture’ and as an accomplishment, ‘not work’…”.⁹ Marcos’s installation pushes past the “burdensome tradition” of embroidery as a domestic hobby by positioning it as industrial labor and situating it within a re-reading of labor histories.

For this installation and its iteration in Manchester, Marcos worked with Hakan Demir, a studio assistant and embroidery programmer. Hakan learned embroidery programming by collaborating and learning together in direct conversation with the machine.

Although intended for industrial production, this machine comes with no operating manual. Knowledge of how to run and troubleshoot the clunky user interface must be passed from person to person through demonstration and the sharing of knowledge, much like manual craft techniques of the past. Hakan has now taken on the role of passing on what he learns to others. 

A new aspect of this installation at De Fabriek is experimentation with embroidering on paper rather than textile, referencing the site’s history as a former bookbinding workshop. This new technique poses specific challenges, as paper tears easily during machine embroidery. 
Hakan found a solution within bookbinding techniques themselves: by reinforcing the paper with bookbinding gauze, it becomes strong enough to prevent tearing. By responding to the delicacy of paper with bookbinding materials, the work subtly deconstructs and repurposes bookbinding processes while referencing De Fabriek’s former function. Although the machine appears to run autonomously, the operator’s management of it significantly influences the quality of its production. 

This installation in Eindhoven pushes the embroidery machine to its limits positioning it as both performer within the artwork and producer of the artwork via a collaboration between human and machine, where only the machine’s labor remains visible and on display. 

5. WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF A MACHINE?

If you look closely at the machine in the installation, you will notice the following text printed on a sticker: 

SAFETY INSTRUCTIONS
1. Machine must be operated by a well-trained person only. 
2. Machine must be used for original purpose only, do not use for other purposes. 
3. Shut machine off to oil, adjust or service.
4. Do not operate machine fill close and fix cover. 
5. Do not leave running when unattended.

The machine on display is branded HappyJapan but was renamed Michelle by Hakan and Marcos. In producing this work, both programmer and artist have developed a working relationship with the machine. Herself a worker imported from Asia to produce in a European factory, the safety instructions printed on Michelle’s body highlight her needs: the presence of a well-trained human to operate her, not to be left alone…

Although the machine appears to operate on her own, these instructions, as well as the extensive programming, human experimentation, and human problem solving which is behind her smooth operation, make it clear that she is far less autonomous than she seems. Beyond her need for human labor, she also leaves a large ecological footprint, demanding energy, consuming raw materials, and producing waste in order to fulfill global production demands. 

As noted by art historian T’ai Smith, “craft pertains to those everyday items, mostly mass-produced, which are nevertheless manufactured (manually created).”¹⁰ Every industrially produced item made with the help of machines is still “assembled in part by hand, by workers in some factory in Bangladesh, Thailand, or China.”¹⁰ Read from a Southeast Asian perspective, machines like Michelle are integral to export-oriented manufacturing economies, but her apparent mechanical autonomy obscures the human and ecological infrastructures that are essential to her productivity. The pervasiveness of craft and handmaking extends into the dialogue between industrial machines and their operators. 

In this installation, the machine is a performer who moves and dances within the space. She is placed on a stage and put under a spotlight, observed while performing her choreographed (pre-programmed) routine. By imitating not only the visual and physical qualities of factory production but also its auditory conditions produced through the loud production noises which echo in the empty space, visitors can imagine what it might have been like to work alongside many such machines running simultaneously. 

6. LOVE / LABOR / LONELINESS 

Within a space from which humans have been removed, the machine continues working by itself. Immersed in sound and darkness, it occupies a timeless space of endlessness: endless work, endless production. Does it still make sense to produce on such a scale? When does it stop? And what happens after production stops?

Scattered across the factory floor around the machine are the ghosts of former workers. Fabric sculptures by artist, fashion designer, and stylist ah Wei ya (Vincent Wong)¹¹ stand frozen in time, shaped in positions which suggest the sudden disappearance of the humans whose bodies they hold space for.

Made from secondhand workers’ clothing found in the Netherlands and based on the garments worn by De Fabriek’s former workers in archival images, this clothing stands despite the absence of bodies to inhabit it. The stillness, silence, and absence of human labor within the space is in stark contrast to the machine’s movement and sound. Wong’s frozen fabric sculptures complement the machine’s performance, playing with the absence and presence of bodies in space, memory, and time, experimenting with material through his expert manipulation of clothing.

By creating sculptures using clothes which were actually worn by laborers, the imprints left by the bodies of those past human wearers remain present in the installation.¹² No matter how we try, human traces cannot be removed from the fabrics which they wore or produced, nor from the machines which they operated.¹³ The impacts of industrial systems on the environment persist long after humans leave. These afterlives are not confined to European post-industrial sites but continue across the Global South and Southeast Asia, where they are acutely visible in landscapes shaped by global cycles of production and disposal. 

On Time is a visualization of how technological systems of production continue to generate ecological consequences long after human labor has been displaced or rendered invisible. By emphasizing these residual traces through the absence of human labor and material, the installation invites us to consider how industry continues to shape ecological landscapes across Southeast Asia and Europe. 

By rendering human beings invisible, On Time examines the hierarchies of production and questions what it means to produce work, whether as an artist or as a machine. How possible is it to “automate” processes and remove human intervention entirely, and is that the world we want to live in? If the machine appears to operate without human interference, is she the performer or the artist? Can she ever operate truly autonomously?