UNITED FOR LIFE
Alphabet de filières | 2025
Inhabiting the factory
Entering a factory means crossing a threshold and allowing oneself to be altered by a temporal regime that is no longer that of the outside world. Here, time is measured by the pace of the machines, the pressure of the flow of materials, and the mechanics of repeated movements. Perrine Lacroix's residency at Rustin is not part of the company in order to capture a decor; it intrudes in the heart of an environment to be experienced, traversed, breathed.
Being alongside the staff, sharing the heat of the ovens, the steam-filled air, the clattering of the moulds, is to experience a collective physicality in which spaces bend to bodies and bodies to the rhythms of matter. It’s to experience a form of synesthesia where breath, heat, movement and light intertwine in a continuum. Within this regulated space, however, it is the imagination that comes to the fore. For in the margins, between the interstices of production, unexpected images emerge, a detail that confuses perception, a gesture that becomes a figure. The artist's camera aims to collect, to adopt a posture of withdrawal, of listening. The employees, in affirming their expertise, constitute themselves as knowledgeable subjects and gradually begin to suggest images, propose angles, and open up the space of productive everyday life to shared invention. Perrine Lacroix's work does not come as an addition or commentary, but rather as a way of cracking open the obvious, infiltrating routine in order to reveal its invisible side.
Inhabit the factory is to enter into a story. The story of Louis Rustin, inventor of rubber adhesive patches, that of a century of workers, innovations, and gestures passed down and transformed. The factory is an organism that breathes and metamorphoses. A body of metal and fire, a flow of rubber, a circulation of air and voices, a hive of activity by day, a silent temple by night. The transformation of matter takes on a ritual dimension. It inscribes at the very heart of the architecture, along the walls traversed by zenithal light, a common rhythm that connects tools, machines and humans in a single breath.
From there, the factory ceases to be merely a place of production. What seemed to be part of the infra-ordinary— the repeated act, the constraints of the process, the mechanical logic — is overturned in language. Raw materiality becomes a sign, the invisible everyday is transformed into a narrative. For Perrine Lacroix, the industrial site thus becomes a heterotopic space, both concrete and symbolic, where mechanical work and artistic work are not opposed; they intertwine. The factory produces stories, archives, subjectivities that reveal themselves with their own signs.
This shift is also a way for the artist to make visible those who usually disappear behind production figures. By opening up technical tools to a poetic reading, Perrine Lacroix transforms the factory into a broader field where the memory of bodies, the plasticity of materials and the symbolic power of forms come together. In this sense, her work takes the form of an internal operation that gives voice to what was once silent.
Archaeology of gesture
« Rustiner ». This gesture, in Rustin's work, transcends its technical function to become a figure, a metaphor, a narrative fragment. It becomes a language in its own right, a sign of presence and care, capable of telling a story without resorting to words. Like Japanese kintsugi, which emphasises the fracture rather than concealing it, repair becomes a mode of appearance. In a world governed by the rhythm of capitalism, the value of an object is measured by its novelty and its capacity to be consumed and then discarded; « rustiner » thus becomes an act of resistance. The patch is no longer just a repair, it becomes an ecological gesture, an ethical gesture. It rejects the logic of planned obsolescence, it interrupts the race for instantaneity and replacement.
Perrine Lacroix's work focuses on what, at the heart of reality, escapes the gaze. In the enclosed space of the laboratory, she uses photography to capture these drawers where for decades the color and texture tests of rubber and silicone have been lined up, a material archives which reveal the persistence of time and the constancy of matter. Then she extracts these Colour Charts from their utilitarian organisation, lays them flat, and reorganises them according to an arithmetic logic that allows chance to emerge. The initial order is undone to reveal what the material retains of its own durations.
Under the factory roof, everything at first appears to be governed by protocol, repetition, metronomic rhythm and the segmentation of tasks. Productivist rationality operates as a mechanism of fragmentation, dissociating, cutting up and isolating each gesture in order to assign it a function, to the point of turning the body into a cog in the chain. However, movement is never purely mechanical. It carries layers of memory and know-how, condensing a culture and a relationship to the world. The tiny gap between the rule and its execution, the nuance of repetition, bring to the surface the possibility of a singular language, an inscription that resists erasure. Faced with this mechanism, Perrine Lacroix undertakes a work of re-inscription in order to restore density to the mundane and power of appearance to the ordinary.
Photographing gloves shaped by use — each pair marked with the unique imprint of a job, a function, an action — is like unearthing the silent memory of bodies at work. Latex, collected from rubber trees as a protective, insulating and waterproofing material, preserves the echo of an ancient practice that each glove reflects.
Filming the material as it is heated, extruded and cooled; capturing the smoke from a furnace or the staff leaving during an emergency drill. These are fragments taken from the flow of everyday life. What wears out, what erodes, what seems doomed to routine is transformed into a living archive, an active testimony to the passage of time.
The factory thus appears as a vast choreography, a ballet orchestrated by the rhythms and pulses of the machines, where each day invents a new score. Colours code the flows: red for patches destined for Asia, black for train frames bound for Norway, grey for profiles dedicated to the Nile.From the laboratory to extrusion, from tooling to shipping, the workstations follow one another and harmonise in a polyphony of gestures and bodies.
Worker’s typography
For Perrine Lacroix, her encounter with metal dies proved to be a fundamental experiment during her residency. These tools, initially designed to constrain material, guide rubber or channel silicone, slip out of their industrial use to manifest themselves in a different way, as matrix figures, as graphic archetypes. Diverted from their utilitarian purpose, they open up to a possible language, a potential alphabet that does not come from the act of writing, but from the inherent resistance of the materials, their internal friction, and the traces accumulated through their daily contact with workers' hands.
From then on, the desire arose to retain the first names, initially in an intuitive manner, almost out of a need to anchor oneself to this unknown territory, and then to inscribe them within the factory itself using this new alphabet. 130 Prénoms. Personnel (130 First names. Staff) are thus displayed on the walls, corridors and shared spaces, intertwining the uniqueness of individual lives with the industrial topography. The inscriptions go beyond the visible surface and bring about a reversal of perspective. What was once a number, a statistic, suddenly becomes a face and a presence. The collective fresco is composed like an imprint, marked by identities that can be read through a language forged by the tools of their trade. This writing, however, remains unique, almost cryptic. It is only fully accessible to those who handle these tools every day, who are able to recognise the imprint of a tool in the graphic form. This new set of characters thus constitutes an internal code, reserved for the community of employees, an intimate language that gives workers back the ability to interpret their own signs.
Where the Latin alphabet imposes a universal standard, the Rustin alphabet deploys an endogenous syntax, born of the very material it organises, to become a collective grammar. The rubber suspensions, cut by water jet, also express their own language. The machine traces a map, a secret network revealed by the perforations, similar to patch matrices. The red suspension evokes Jacquard's perforated cards, the binary matrix which, by mechanising the loom, heralded the beginning of computer language.
Here, the holes become suspension points, fragments of a discourse in which the craftsmanship is extended into the mechanics of digital flows. The black suspensions, meanwhile, form large Constellations, two hemispheres standing side by side. They echo the centrifugal circulation of matter. Rubber trees from South America, Asia and Africa are transported to the Rustin factory in the Sarthe region of France, before being shipped out again, transformed into rubber, to the four corners of the globe. The perforated circles thus become the fabric of this circulation. By transposing the Bristol boards that classify
The profiles and positions of the sectors, in graphic compositions, Perrine Lacroix shifts the status of the document. What was once a production sheet is reconfigured into a plastic score, blurring the boundary between function and poetry. The factory then becomes a palimpsest, a layered space in which each industrial or artistic surface bears the traces of mutual contamination. Language ceases to be a simple tool of communication; it detaches itself from its instrumental function in order to imprint itself on the very texture of reality. In this way, the working-class typography proposed by Perrine Lacroix affirms that industry does not only manufacture objects but also narratives and subjectivities, which, through this work of shaping, find new visibility and a common language.
Mya Finbow, 2025
Entering a factory means crossing a threshold and allowing oneself to be altered by a temporal regime that is no longer that of the outside world. Here, time is measured by the pace of the machines, the pressure of the flow of materials, and the mechanics of repeated movements. Perrine Lacroix's residency at Rustin is not part of the company in order to capture a decor; it intrudes in the heart of an environment to be experienced, traversed, breathed.
Being alongside the staff, sharing the heat of the ovens, the steam-filled air, the clattering of the moulds, is to experience a collective physicality in which spaces bend to bodies and bodies to the rhythms of matter. It’s to experience a form of synesthesia where breath, heat, movement and light intertwine in a continuum. Within this regulated space, however, it is the imagination that comes to the fore. For in the margins, between the interstices of production, unexpected images emerge, a detail that confuses perception, a gesture that becomes a figure. The artist's camera aims to collect, to adopt a posture of withdrawal, of listening. The employees, in affirming their expertise, constitute themselves as knowledgeable subjects and gradually begin to suggest images, propose angles, and open up the space of productive everyday life to shared invention. Perrine Lacroix's work does not come as an addition or commentary, but rather as a way of cracking open the obvious, infiltrating routine in order to reveal its invisible side.
Inhabit the factory is to enter into a story. The story of Louis Rustin, inventor of rubber adhesive patches, that of a century of workers, innovations, and gestures passed down and transformed. The factory is an organism that breathes and metamorphoses. A body of metal and fire, a flow of rubber, a circulation of air and voices, a hive of activity by day, a silent temple by night. The transformation of matter takes on a ritual dimension. It inscribes at the very heart of the architecture, along the walls traversed by zenithal light, a common rhythm that connects tools, machines and humans in a single breath.
From there, the factory ceases to be merely a place of production. What seemed to be part of the infra-ordinary— the repeated act, the constraints of the process, the mechanical logic — is overturned in language. Raw materiality becomes a sign, the invisible everyday is transformed into a narrative. For Perrine Lacroix, the industrial site thus becomes a heterotopic space, both concrete and symbolic, where mechanical work and artistic work are not opposed; they intertwine. The factory produces stories, archives, subjectivities that reveal themselves with their own signs.
This shift is also a way for the artist to make visible those who usually disappear behind production figures. By opening up technical tools to a poetic reading, Perrine Lacroix transforms the factory into a broader field where the memory of bodies, the plasticity of materials and the symbolic power of forms come together. In this sense, her work takes the form of an internal operation that gives voice to what was once silent.
Archaeology of gesture
« Rustiner ». This gesture, in Rustin's work, transcends its technical function to become a figure, a metaphor, a narrative fragment. It becomes a language in its own right, a sign of presence and care, capable of telling a story without resorting to words. Like Japanese kintsugi, which emphasises the fracture rather than concealing it, repair becomes a mode of appearance. In a world governed by the rhythm of capitalism, the value of an object is measured by its novelty and its capacity to be consumed and then discarded; « rustiner » thus becomes an act of resistance. The patch is no longer just a repair, it becomes an ecological gesture, an ethical gesture. It rejects the logic of planned obsolescence, it interrupts the race for instantaneity and replacement.
Perrine Lacroix's work focuses on what, at the heart of reality, escapes the gaze. In the enclosed space of the laboratory, she uses photography to capture these drawers where for decades the color and texture tests of rubber and silicone have been lined up, a material archives which reveal the persistence of time and the constancy of matter. Then she extracts these Colour Charts from their utilitarian organisation, lays them flat, and reorganises them according to an arithmetic logic that allows chance to emerge. The initial order is undone to reveal what the material retains of its own durations.
Under the factory roof, everything at first appears to be governed by protocol, repetition, metronomic rhythm and the segmentation of tasks. Productivist rationality operates as a mechanism of fragmentation, dissociating, cutting up and isolating each gesture in order to assign it a function, to the point of turning the body into a cog in the chain. However, movement is never purely mechanical. It carries layers of memory and know-how, condensing a culture and a relationship to the world. The tiny gap between the rule and its execution, the nuance of repetition, bring to the surface the possibility of a singular language, an inscription that resists erasure. Faced with this mechanism, Perrine Lacroix undertakes a work of re-inscription in order to restore density to the mundane and power of appearance to the ordinary.
Photographing gloves shaped by use — each pair marked with the unique imprint of a job, a function, an action — is like unearthing the silent memory of bodies at work. Latex, collected from rubber trees as a protective, insulating and waterproofing material, preserves the echo of an ancient practice that each glove reflects.
Filming the material as it is heated, extruded and cooled; capturing the smoke from a furnace or the staff leaving during an emergency drill. These are fragments taken from the flow of everyday life. What wears out, what erodes, what seems doomed to routine is transformed into a living archive, an active testimony to the passage of time.
The factory thus appears as a vast choreography, a ballet orchestrated by the rhythms and pulses of the machines, where each day invents a new score. Colours code the flows: red for patches destined for Asia, black for train frames bound for Norway, grey for profiles dedicated to the Nile.From the laboratory to extrusion, from tooling to shipping, the workstations follow one another and harmonise in a polyphony of gestures and bodies.
Worker’s typography
For Perrine Lacroix, her encounter with metal dies proved to be a fundamental experiment during her residency. These tools, initially designed to constrain material, guide rubber or channel silicone, slip out of their industrial use to manifest themselves in a different way, as matrix figures, as graphic archetypes. Diverted from their utilitarian purpose, they open up to a possible language, a potential alphabet that does not come from the act of writing, but from the inherent resistance of the materials, their internal friction, and the traces accumulated through their daily contact with workers' hands.
From then on, the desire arose to retain the first names, initially in an intuitive manner, almost out of a need to anchor oneself to this unknown territory, and then to inscribe them within the factory itself using this new alphabet. 130 Prénoms. Personnel (130 First names. Staff) are thus displayed on the walls, corridors and shared spaces, intertwining the uniqueness of individual lives with the industrial topography. The inscriptions go beyond the visible surface and bring about a reversal of perspective. What was once a number, a statistic, suddenly becomes a face and a presence. The collective fresco is composed like an imprint, marked by identities that can be read through a language forged by the tools of their trade. This writing, however, remains unique, almost cryptic. It is only fully accessible to those who handle these tools every day, who are able to recognise the imprint of a tool in the graphic form. This new set of characters thus constitutes an internal code, reserved for the community of employees, an intimate language that gives workers back the ability to interpret their own signs.
Where the Latin alphabet imposes a universal standard, the Rustin alphabet deploys an endogenous syntax, born of the very material it organises, to become a collective grammar. The rubber suspensions, cut by water jet, also express their own language. The machine traces a map, a secret network revealed by the perforations, similar to patch matrices. The red suspension evokes Jacquard's perforated cards, the binary matrix which, by mechanising the loom, heralded the beginning of computer language.
Here, the holes become suspension points, fragments of a discourse in which the craftsmanship is extended into the mechanics of digital flows. The black suspensions, meanwhile, form large Constellations, two hemispheres standing side by side. They echo the centrifugal circulation of matter. Rubber trees from South America, Asia and Africa are transported to the Rustin factory in the Sarthe region of France, before being shipped out again, transformed into rubber, to the four corners of the globe. The perforated circles thus become the fabric of this circulation. By transposing the Bristol boards that classify
The profiles and positions of the sectors, in graphic compositions, Perrine Lacroix shifts the status of the document. What was once a production sheet is reconfigured into a plastic score, blurring the boundary between function and poetry. The factory then becomes a palimpsest, a layered space in which each industrial or artistic surface bears the traces of mutual contamination. Language ceases to be a simple tool of communication; it detaches itself from its instrumental function in order to imprint itself on the very texture of reality. In this way, the working-class typography proposed by Perrine Lacroix affirms that industry does not only manufacture objects but also narratives and subjectivities, which, through this work of shaping, find new visibility and a common language.
Mya Finbow, 2025