Ore 18.00, l’orario è finito / 6 p.m., the working time is over is a photographic project developed by Massimiliano Camellini inside the former Leumann cotton mill of Collegno (Turin) from 2010 to 2013, curated by Lorand Hegyi.
Massimiliano Camellini photographed the interiors of the antique Leumann cotton mill of Collegno (Turin) which was at the centre of the innovative worker’s village that the industrialist Napoleone Leumann had built around the factory between the end of the Nineteenth and beginning of the Twentieth century: a savvy entrepreneurial experiment where the factory boasted all the same social resources as the village.
This photographic project tells of the end of an industrial era in Europe, the end of a dream based on manufacturing expansion and its welfare which, at that time, had not reckoned with globalisation.
The images were taken between 2010 and 2013 and tell of the presence of the workers who lived the factory and who walked through its gates for the last time in April 2007 – never to be opened again. Everything was still in its place almost as if it had been abandoned suddenly and unexpectedly.
The images reconstruct the last day of work, that instant when the end of the working day (18.00) coincided with the end of an era.
Lorand Hegyi, in his publication dedicated to the project “Objectivity versus empathy.
Notes on photographic reconstructions of possible life actions”, writes: “The images tell of a certain past, they act as a link and transmit a world that no longer exists, but that is still recognizable in the traces left, a world with its joys and its miseries, with its small events and its large structures, which have determined the smallest details in the lives of actors of the past ….. Massimiliano Camellini shows us the past with tiny, almost invisible and insignificant details of the present day which in themselves enclose and embrace the whole of the past. And from this stems melancholy, the fatalistic internalisation of the passing of time while we empathetically experiment all of Lebensvergangenheit (“the past that progressively becomes one with contemporary life”) in our surrounding environment.”
