!publish!

content/research/maddeningrhythms.md

@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ aliases = ["/zine"]
 ![](static/images/piu_macchina.png)
 
 
-## The story from which we started: Lebole, c. 1964
+# The story from which we started: Lebole, c. 1964
 
 In 1964, the all-female workforce of the apparel manufacturer Lebole in Arezzo, Tuscany, were among the first ones in Italy to experience the transformation of their workflow according to the teachings of MTM (Methods-Time Measurement), a new methodology for analysing and organizing chainwork imported from the USA.  In the span of less than a decade, these women, many of whom were accomplished tailors before entering the factory, went from a semi-artisanal organization of labour, to a progressively more fragmented and repetitive segmentation of tasks, to a fully scripted repetitive performance with maddening rhythms.  With the introduction of the MTM method, their movements were measured and minutiously analysed by a team of experts, who then "choreographed" the execution of each motion in a new, time-saving manner. In short, the workers were expected to behave like ROBOTS. 
 
@@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ By developing in their own form of musical production, Lebole's workers interven
 Finding their own voice and fighting for keeping it was more than a metaphor for the Leboline: with bitter irony, amongst the many health-related struggles these women carried on, one was against the indiscriminate use of formaldehyde, a compound used to augment the firmness of clothes, but which has a harmfull impact on the troath and vocal chords. 
 
 
-## Luigi Firrao 
+# Luigi Firrao 
 
 We first encountered the story of the Lebole workers and the impact that MTM had on their lives and health conditions during our research residency at the archive of Fondazione ISEC in Sesto San Giovanni, near Milan. Their story was "told" to by Luigi Firrao, who followed it meticulously for a number of years. Firrao had a number of interviews with the Leboline, where he chatted with them about their experiences, as well as recording the powerful lyrics of their political choruses. He then wrote several newspaper articles denouncing the hidden violence of the new management techniques which were silently creeping in Italian factories since the early 1960s. Firrao also left us an exceptional collection of newspaper cut-outs, articles, and reportages on the theme of MTM and its impact on the life of the workers. 
 
@@ -43,7 +43,7 @@ In 1969, after publicly taking position in favor of the student movement, he was
 
 The text above is a modified translation of [*Luigi Firrao, un uomo dai molti talenti nelle carte del suo archivio*](https://archivio.fondazioneisec.it/percorsi/luigi-firrao-un-uomo-poliedrico-nelle-carte-del-suo-archivio), by Alberto De Cristofaro.
 
-## About Maddening Rhythms Zine
+# About Maddening Rhythms Zine
 
 Maddening Rhythms is the name we gave to the experimental publication you are holding between your hands or reading on your screen. It is a growing, mutating zine that accompanies our research exploring the links between healthcare, environmental and work-related struggles from an Italian standpoint. The title we chose for this zine is our English translation of the one of a newspaper article - RITMI DA PAZZIA - which denounced how in the factory workers are subjected to a constant accelleration in the name of profit. These rhythms are maddening in the sense that were making people furious and push them to organize for change, while at the same time they also provoked many to experience negative mental health conditions. As we shall see, burnouts, depression and psychosis were widespread experiences linked with chain work. The story of Lebole workers' and their resistance to the MTM method became for us a red thread to be able to navigate the intricacies of these epochal changes in governance, technologies and methods of exploitation, as well as changes in the subjects, places, and modes of doing politics.
 
@@ -52,7 +52,7 @@ The zine comes complete with its own library of resources, some of which are doc
 Maddening Rhythms is organized around 5 'factors', each centering one aspect of the Leboline's experiences and struggles and using it to introduce a broader reflection. We believe that reactivating some of the stories, techniques and imaginaries that came out of the struggles for health that took place in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s 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. Connecting with the struggles that first obtained a public healthcare system might help us sharpen our demands for the future. 
 
 
-## Italian Healthcare struggles
+# Italian Healthcare struggles
 
 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).
 
@@ -73,7 +73,7 @@ Abandoning the tradition of a corporatist health system with its limited coverag
 The link between the self-organized struggles and the new public system becomes apparent in the way it was designed in its original conception (albeit soon corrupted by a series of reactionary modification to the law).  In several areas – mental health, occupational health, women’s health, drug treatments - new knowledge on illness prevention, new practices of service delivery and innovative institutional arrangements emerged, with a strong emphasis on territorial services addressing together health and social needs. The movements' legacy was palpable in the integrated vision of health – physical and psychic, individual and collective, linked to the community and the territory – that emerged. The struggles were clear in their proposal: a new, less hierarchical type of doctor-patient relationship was needed; healthcare should be linked to territories and, as much as possible, conducted in participatory manner; preventive approaches, rather than curing, were central in this vision. This political strategy viewed health as combining a collective dimension and an individual condition; collective struggles were therefore needed to address the economic and social roots of disease and public health problems. This approach was paralleled by the feminist movement in addressing women’s health issues, including the important experiments in self-organized health clinics. As Giulio Maccacaro had argued in 1976, the strategy was a bottom-up “politicization of medicine”, challenging the way industrial capitalism was exploiting workers and undermining health and social conditions in the country.
 
 
-## Who we are
+# Who we are
 
 Maddalena Fragnito and Valeria Graziano collaborated for the first time on the research [Rebelling with Care. Exploring open technologies for commoning healthcare](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p1lYRdjZd0MsRJCMewelfdk9hnGGGz4E/view) (2019). A year later they were co-writing of the syllabus of [Pirate Care](https://pirate.care) (2019) and [Flatten the curve, grow the care!](https://syllabus.pirate.care/topic/coronanotes/), a project born with the outbreak of the pandemic (2020). With to the support of Memory of the World, in 2021 they collaborated for the digitization of the books series [Medicina e potere](http://medicinapotere.memoryoftheworld.org/#) (Medicine and Power), edited in the '70s by Giulio Maccacaro for the publisher Feltrinelli. Currently, they share the artist residence Matrice Lavoro (curated by Base Milano and the ISEC Foundation), which allowed them to dig into the archives in search for the forgotten stories related to workers' struggles for health in Italy (2022).