“The Pickers” (2009)

- PICKED BY LELIA-
June 2022

Summary (taken from: https://www.adamchodzko.com/works/the-pickers/)

This video installation by Adam Chodzko shows a group of young Romanian migrant workers at a strawberry farm in Kent who, through Chodzko’s involvement, over a period of time, temporarily alternate their intensive strawberry picking labour with another form of work, the editing and mediation of a 20th-century film archive of migrant hop pickers from London. The young Romanian strawberry workers (Estera Boguº, Mihai Boguº, Ionuþ Roºu, Remus Bujor) project memories of Ceaucescu’s Romania onto the English hop-picking footage. Facial expressions shown in these archival recordings provoke, in the present, comparisons as to the relative contentment of the two communities and cultures.

Sound is crucial to this work; it actively bridges different spaces (editing room, strawberry farm interior, hop field exterior etc) and its fluid relationship to the visual in the forms of different coincidences, some appearing to be accidental, ‘wrong’, actual, ideal or imaginary.

Stream “The Pickers” on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/105290744