!publish!

content/research/crazyrhythms.md

@@ -4,9 +4,9 @@ has_factors = ["americandepartment.md", "Noxiousness.md", "doppelganger.md", "co
 +++
 
 
-# About Maddening Rhythms: Healthcare struggles at the intersection of technology, environment and refusal of work
+# Maddening Rhythms: Healthcare struggles at the intersection of technology, environment and refusal of work
 
-## The story from which we started: About 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 the MTM (Motion Time Measurement) Method 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. 
 
@@ -21,7 +21,7 @@ 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. 
 
 
-## About the Fondo Luigi Firrao 
+## Luigi Firrao 
 
 We first encountered the story of the Lebole workers and the impact that the MTM Method had on their lives and health conditions during our research residency at the archive of Fondazione ISEC in Sesto San Giovanni, near Milan. 
 
@@ -63,7 +63,7 @@ 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.
 
 
-## About us
+## 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).