Travail à façon

Ballet's engagement with this sector and the world of labour is longstanding but it was through invitations from the Parc Naturel Régional (PNR) of the Monts d'Ardèche and the Pilat, followed by the City of Bourg-Argental as part of the New Patrons initiative, that prompted her to carry out new investigations. Élisabeth Ballet engaged in numerous encounters: workers who had been employed in silk mills in Ardèche, business owners (some of whom had ceased their activities), and with an array of extensive archives: apprenticeship journals, insurance documents and inventories detailing both tools of the trade and the spatial organisation of these working environments — thereby uncovering their architecture.
The book serves as a place where the gathered materials are structured. Through the interviews conducted in workshops and factories, a perception of the practices and gestures of the activities carried out within these spaces gradually emerges. Drawings, made from photographic surveys of the workspaces, punctuate the book and introduce each story of professional engagement. In this way, Élisabeth Ballet thus gives a place to the existing and reveals an activity that, in the eyes of some, belonged to the past.