Corporate Residence
Mya Finbow |
from 01 janvier 2025 to 01 janvier 2027
Résidence dans les Établissements Rustin
portée par l’Association Les Moulins de Paillard
soutenue par le ministère de la Culture-Drac des Pays de la Loire
portée par l’Association Les Moulins de Paillard
soutenue par le ministère de la Culture-Drac des Pays de la Loire
Presence, Residency
In this place of industry since 1830,
where the work of the hand sings, where the precise gesture shapes time, visual artist Perrine Lacroix, in residence at the Crousilles site, brings imagination into the rubber substance, and rubber into imagination.
Present among the workers, the machines and the production lines, Perrine does not propose a decorative illustration, but rather a sensitive mediation that invites everyone to look differently the heritage of labor, the space and the bodies that inhabit them. It acts as a glance propeller, a curious witness that transforms the perception of “ordinary” work into an aesthetic and moral experience.
This presence, artist’s residency within the factory is not a pause from reality, but rather a connection, an enhancer of the real. It questions the gestures, rhythms, and constraints that structure the industrial life of RUSTIN : precision, repetition, safety, and the uncertainties of daily work. Through installations, sculptures, photos and videos, the artist opens fields of listening and perception: light weaving in and out through a mesh of rubber sheet, a burst of steam from the autoclave, the smell of smoked sheets, the glow of heated metal tools, the space occupied by the workers’ bodies, the gestures that tell a collective story. Art, then, becomes a mirror, a laboratory: a place where emotion and beauty can coexist with technical rigor, where poetry can emerge from gestures performed on a cylinder, within a world governed by the language of industrial performance.
Perrine Lacroix has given a voice to those who often remain outside official discourses on industrial production. By engaging in dialogue with all components of our factory, the artist offers specific points of view which, while characterizing the site, also redraw it like a sensitive map reminding us that work is also a human, cultural, and aesthetic experience.
I would like to thank the partners who believed in this project: Les Moulins de Paillard, Artistic Fabrication Workshop in Poncé-sur-le-Loir, Loir Valley; the French Ministry of Culture – DRAC Pays de la Loire, through the Artist Residency in Business program, which made it possible to open an industrial site to art and to reveal what too often remains invisible.
I thank Perrine Lacroix, who is now part of the RUSTIN team, as well as all the women and men of the Crousilles site.
Louis-Alain Rustin Director of Établissements L. RUSTIN
Art and working environments
Thanks to the Artist Residency in Business programme run by the Ministry of Culture - Drac Pays de la Loire, the Les Moulins de Paillard art centre, in partnership with businesses in the region, welcomes and supports artists in the area. In 2024, Paillard hosted photographer Elena Groud with SAS Hotelanantes.net, in Saint-Sébastien sur-Loire. In 2026, it will be the turn of Boris Chouvellon, in collaboration with the Sarthe-based company SARL Charpente Cénomane, in Requeil.
In complete discretion…
Thus, in 2025, Perrine Lacroix lives in two heritage buildings on the banks of the Loir. At first glance, it would seem that only the river and the tuffeau stone connect these places: the river attracted industrialists in the 18th and 19th centuries, while the tuffeau stone from the surrounding hillsides provided the necessary material for construction. However, Établissements L. RUSTIN, in La Chartre-sur-le-Loir, and Les Moulins de Paillard, in Poncé-sur-le-Loir, Loir en Vallée, share much more than water and stone. In these two historic sites in the Loir Valley – one where rubber reigns supreme, the other where the arts take precedence – the activities differ but the management visions are similar: flexible rigour, creative discipline, respect for life. You only have to gently push open the doors to see their affinities revealed. On a local, national and international scale, these two places work discreetly, following the example of artist-in-residence Perrine Lacroix. Our encounter with Perrine dates back to 2014, when she was invited by curator Alexandra Fau to participate in the exhibition Architecture invisible at Les Moulins de Paillard. Perrine presented two contrasting works, two stories of escape. Winfried, a video tribute to the last victim of the Berlin Wall who attempted to escape by air, and Via aerea, an inflatable polyethylene balloon that fills the space from floor to ceiling. This black, moving shape is a tribute to Jean Montgolfier, a prisoner in Damascus during the Second Crusade, who is said to have escaped with the recipe for paper. A few centuries later, his descendants, the Montgolfier brothers, then directors of the family paper mill, made the first flight in French skies. Their hot air balloon – then called a globe – into which hot air was blown was first made of cotton canvas coated with paper on both sides, then of silk fabric waterproofed with a rubber-based varnish. Via aerea already contains a double evocation, both with the former Moulins de Paillard paper mill and with the rubber factory that the artist did not yet know. In 2025, we suggested to Perrine that we continue our collaboration with the Artistic Residency in Business programme, and it was only natural to turn to our neighbours, the Établissements L. Rustin, to imagine the next chapter in this story. The prompt and generous response from Louis-Alain Rustin, followed by the warm welcome from everyone at the legendary Crousilles site, remain a source of wonder and gratitude for us. Perrine's attention to industrial heritage, as well as to the people who work there, paves the way for the invention of rich and sensitive stories, where machines, technologies, craftsmanship and human beings intersect. Through Perrine's lens, we believe we can discern ghosts in the machines, a duality, often deceptive, between the material and the immaterial. In her meticulous, sharp images, Perrine blurs the lines between the work captured and the artist's work. Together with the board of directors of the Les Moulins de Paillard association, we would like to thank the Ministry of Culture – DRAC Pays de la Loire, Sandrine Moreau, visual arts advisor, Louis-Alain Rustin and the entire team at Etablissements L.Rustin, as well as Pauline Burnier for her invaluable assistance in putting together and following up on the project, Zoélie Veillaux for her contributions, and finally Perrine Lacroix, who gently pushed open the big doors to share the heritage of the Loir Valley.
Shelly De Vito & James Porter Artistic Directors of Les Moulins de Paillard living in 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 setting; it immerses itself 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 is 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. To inhabit the factory is to enter into a story. That of Louis Rustin, inventor of rubber adhesive pads, 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 prints have been lined up for decades. Colours and textures of rubber and silicone, material archives that reveal the persistence of time and the constancy of matter. She then 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 durations².
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. Working typography for Perrine Lacroix, her encounter with metal pipes 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. 132 First Names 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
In this place of industry since 1830,
where the work of the hand sings, where the precise gesture shapes time, visual artist Perrine Lacroix, in residence at the Crousilles site, brings imagination into the rubber substance, and rubber into imagination.
Present among the workers, the machines and the production lines, Perrine does not propose a decorative illustration, but rather a sensitive mediation that invites everyone to look differently the heritage of labor, the space and the bodies that inhabit them. It acts as a glance propeller, a curious witness that transforms the perception of “ordinary” work into an aesthetic and moral experience.
This presence, artist’s residency within the factory is not a pause from reality, but rather a connection, an enhancer of the real. It questions the gestures, rhythms, and constraints that structure the industrial life of RUSTIN : precision, repetition, safety, and the uncertainties of daily work. Through installations, sculptures, photos and videos, the artist opens fields of listening and perception: light weaving in and out through a mesh of rubber sheet, a burst of steam from the autoclave, the smell of smoked sheets, the glow of heated metal tools, the space occupied by the workers’ bodies, the gestures that tell a collective story. Art, then, becomes a mirror, a laboratory: a place where emotion and beauty can coexist with technical rigor, where poetry can emerge from gestures performed on a cylinder, within a world governed by the language of industrial performance.
Perrine Lacroix has given a voice to those who often remain outside official discourses on industrial production. By engaging in dialogue with all components of our factory, the artist offers specific points of view which, while characterizing the site, also redraw it like a sensitive map reminding us that work is also a human, cultural, and aesthetic experience.
I would like to thank the partners who believed in this project: Les Moulins de Paillard, Artistic Fabrication Workshop in Poncé-sur-le-Loir, Loir Valley; the French Ministry of Culture – DRAC Pays de la Loire, through the Artist Residency in Business program, which made it possible to open an industrial site to art and to reveal what too often remains invisible.
I thank Perrine Lacroix, who is now part of the RUSTIN team, as well as all the women and men of the Crousilles site.
Louis-Alain Rustin Director of Établissements L. RUSTIN
Art and working environments
Thanks to the Artist Residency in Business programme run by the Ministry of Culture - Drac Pays de la Loire, the Les Moulins de Paillard art centre, in partnership with businesses in the region, welcomes and supports artists in the area. In 2024, Paillard hosted photographer Elena Groud with SAS Hotelanantes.net, in Saint-Sébastien sur-Loire. In 2026, it will be the turn of Boris Chouvellon, in collaboration with the Sarthe-based company SARL Charpente Cénomane, in Requeil.
In complete discretion…
Thus, in 2025, Perrine Lacroix lives in two heritage buildings on the banks of the Loir. At first glance, it would seem that only the river and the tuffeau stone connect these places: the river attracted industrialists in the 18th and 19th centuries, while the tuffeau stone from the surrounding hillsides provided the necessary material for construction. However, Établissements L. RUSTIN, in La Chartre-sur-le-Loir, and Les Moulins de Paillard, in Poncé-sur-le-Loir, Loir en Vallée, share much more than water and stone. In these two historic sites in the Loir Valley – one where rubber reigns supreme, the other where the arts take precedence – the activities differ but the management visions are similar: flexible rigour, creative discipline, respect for life. You only have to gently push open the doors to see their affinities revealed. On a local, national and international scale, these two places work discreetly, following the example of artist-in-residence Perrine Lacroix. Our encounter with Perrine dates back to 2014, when she was invited by curator Alexandra Fau to participate in the exhibition Architecture invisible at Les Moulins de Paillard. Perrine presented two contrasting works, two stories of escape. Winfried, a video tribute to the last victim of the Berlin Wall who attempted to escape by air, and Via aerea, an inflatable polyethylene balloon that fills the space from floor to ceiling. This black, moving shape is a tribute to Jean Montgolfier, a prisoner in Damascus during the Second Crusade, who is said to have escaped with the recipe for paper. A few centuries later, his descendants, the Montgolfier brothers, then directors of the family paper mill, made the first flight in French skies. Their hot air balloon – then called a globe – into which hot air was blown was first made of cotton canvas coated with paper on both sides, then of silk fabric waterproofed with a rubber-based varnish. Via aerea already contains a double evocation, both with the former Moulins de Paillard paper mill and with the rubber factory that the artist did not yet know. In 2025, we suggested to Perrine that we continue our collaboration with the Artistic Residency in Business programme, and it was only natural to turn to our neighbours, the Établissements L. Rustin, to imagine the next chapter in this story. The prompt and generous response from Louis-Alain Rustin, followed by the warm welcome from everyone at the legendary Crousilles site, remain a source of wonder and gratitude for us. Perrine's attention to industrial heritage, as well as to the people who work there, paves the way for the invention of rich and sensitive stories, where machines, technologies, craftsmanship and human beings intersect. Through Perrine's lens, we believe we can discern ghosts in the machines, a duality, often deceptive, between the material and the immaterial. In her meticulous, sharp images, Perrine blurs the lines between the work captured and the artist's work. Together with the board of directors of the Les Moulins de Paillard association, we would like to thank the Ministry of Culture – DRAC Pays de la Loire, Sandrine Moreau, visual arts advisor, Louis-Alain Rustin and the entire team at Etablissements L.Rustin, as well as Pauline Burnier for her invaluable assistance in putting together and following up on the project, Zoélie Veillaux for her contributions, and finally Perrine Lacroix, who gently pushed open the big doors to share the heritage of the Loir Valley.
Shelly De Vito & James Porter Artistic Directors of Les Moulins de Paillard living in 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 setting; it immerses itself 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 is 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. To inhabit the factory is to enter into a story. That of Louis Rustin, inventor of rubber adhesive pads, 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 prints have been lined up for decades. Colours and textures of rubber and silicone, material archives that reveal the persistence of time and the constancy of matter. She then 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 durations².
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. Working typography for Perrine Lacroix, her encounter with metal pipes 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. 132 First Names 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