Hiroko Oyamada: 工場 (The Factory)

The latest addition to my website is Hiroko Oyamada‘s 工場 (The Factory)>. We follow the stories of three employees as they go to work at the Factory and are still there, in the same jobs, fifteen years later. Their jobs seem mundane – one shreds documents one proofreads and one is meant to be developing moss for green-roofing the factory. But why is a sophisticated factory using humans to shred? What is being proofread and for whom? And why has the moss man made no progress in fifteen years? What does the factory produce? We have no idea. Why does Goto seem to manage everything? And what are the strange animals seemingly only found on the Factory site? Oyamada tells a strange tale of a seemingly normal working environment which is perhaps not entirely normal.

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