Industrial democracy in suspension by Heni Hale

Through video assemblage and performance practices, artist-researcher Heni Hale shares her encounters with a set of unedited video records of a ‘simulation’ experiment, conducted in 1977 with a merchant navy shipping company Jebsens. The experiment programme, devised with Tavistock Institute of Human Relations action researchers, simulated a ships environment and proposed hypothetical problems to be solved by the group, aiming to develop new decentralised, democratised work systems, to improve conditions, and work relations in the contained environment of industrial sea life. Mobilising a visceral and felt- sense responsivity, Heni tussles with affective impacts of witnessing and touching these suspended fragments of a world seemingly halted in time and heavily defined by a gendered class system. At the same time, she explores the thorny ethics of re-use and mis-use (a term coined by Jaimie Baron, 2021) of archival images, and lack of consent from original participants.

Image credit – stills from Borgnes Seminar. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Source:
Wellcome Collection. SA/TIH/B/2/52/13/1 Tavistock Institute of Human Relations

Heni Hale is a movement and performance artist whose practice navigates the space between bodies, histories, and technologies. Through her collective Project and current post graduate research at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, she explores how movement can activate archives and reimagine past encounters with automation and industrial systems. Drawing on the Tavistock Institute’s 20th-century studies, her work embodies and re-enacts historical moments to explore how technological change continues to shape contemporary working lives. She has also served as co-director of Independent Dance in London, and leads its MA/MFA Creative Practice partnership with Trinity Laban.

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Host or Publisher Julia Pond