!publish!

content/research/crazyrhythms.md

@@ -5,13 +5,35 @@ has_factors = ["americandepartment.md", "MTMinItaly.md", "Noxiousness.md", "dopp
 
 
 
-# About Maddening Rhythms
+# The story from which we started: Lebole 1964
+
+In 1964, the all female workforce of the apparel manufacturer Lebole (Arezzo) were among the first one in Italy to experience the transformation of their way of working according to the teachings of the MTM (Motion Time Measurement) Method imported from the US.  In the span of less than a decade, these women, many of them accomplished tailors before entering the factory, went from a semi-artisanal organization of labour, to a progressively more fragmented and repetitive segmentation of tasks.  With the introduction of the MTM method, their movements, measured and minutiously analysed , became fully "choreographed", the execution of each motion meticulously scripted - in short, they were ordered to behave like ROBOTS. 
+
+The impact of this new way of working for the psycho-somatic health of the Leboline (this was the nickname of the workers) was enourmous. Many experienced faintings, nervous breakdowns and other symptoms of exhaustion, which the factory doctors would try to cure with cycles of "vitamin" injections. One of these women also chose to take her own life. 
+
+But the confrontation with new kinds of technical violence also led the Leboline to become an incredibly active force in the political struggles of the 1960s and 1970s in Italy. They not only fought with and within workers' unions and communist party for better working conditions as part of national mobilizations, but also engaged in battles for social reproduction (pushing for municipal kindergartens, for instance) and for a radical transforming of the psychic and physical healthcare of workers. 
+
+At the beginning of the 1960s, political organizing was forbidden during working hours, while breaks from work were short and few. So the Leboline invented a number of ways to communicate and coordinate: important messages were passed on in a relay during bathroom visits, a practice named "Radio Gabinetto" (Radio Toilet).  The lyrics of traditional and popular hit songs of the time were re-written to convey news and political messages. These songs would then be sung at work and during demonstrations. 
+
+By developing in their own form of musical production, Lebole's workers intervened into the maddening rhythms that marked their experience in the factory, to compose other, more poetic, playful, counter-hegemonic rhythms and political horizons, as well as to compose themselves as an iconic posse within the political struggles that marked the Italian "long 1968". 
+
+Finding their own voice and fighting for keeping it was more than a metaphor for the Leboline: with bitter irony, amongst their many health-related struggles, one was against the indiscriminate use of formaldehyde, a compound used augment the firmness of clothes, but which has a harmfull impact on the troath and vocal chords. 
+
+
+# About Maddening Rhythms: Healthcare struggles at the intersection of technology, environment and refusal of work
+
+In our research, which we present here in form of a growing zine and a related library of resources(some of which, from the Luigi Firrao archive at ISEC Foundation, we are making available here for the first time in digital form), we retrace Lebole's story 
+
+
+focused on one of such struggles for health that took place in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. We believe that reactivating some of the stories, techniques and imaginaries that came out of it can be a useful exercise in our present days, in the aftermath of the Covid-19 syndemic, an event with a death poll that could have been, in large part, preventable.
+
+
 
 The aftermath of WWII saw a number of struggles for health to become recognised as a common good. Many people fought for health practices to be supported via the public sector, and for care to be made available universally and for free at the point of use (that is, paid for through general taxation, rather than via a single payer model).
 
 Some of these struggles were more successful, other were less so, but whenever change came about it was not a top-down decision, but a result of complex mobilizations that often created transversal connections between those affected, organizers and professionals.
 
-In our current research, which we present here in form of a growing zine and library, we focused on one of such struggles for health that took place in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. We believe that reactivating some of the stories, techniques and imaginaries that came out of it can be a useful exercise in our present days, in the aftermath of the Covid-19 syndemic, an event with a death poll that could have been, in large part, preventable.
+
  
 We focus on Italy not only because it is our context of origin, but also because during the decades 1960s and 1970s, it was an extremely lively political laboratory that became significant beyond its own context.