We all carry machines is a lecture-performance that encompasses a film screening and spoken testimony of a meeting with a group city maintenance workers. This is a side-project of my artistic PhD in which I use performance to explore the social component of images that are made during practice-based research.

Every autumn the streets of Amsterdam fill up with fallen leaves. The various brown hues that carpet the city are often a beautiful sight, but it lasts only for a moment as a day of rain can turn everything into a slippery brown mush. Alongside the fallen leaves, figures dressed in orange also appear. Leaf blowers.

In the autumn of 2022, I visited a municipal service yard in Amsterdam and asked if I could attach an analogue filmcamera to the front part of a leaf blower. I was interested in the images that would be made from the perspective of the machine. My request instigated a strange meeting. The meeting was strange because class differences, artisthood, authority and questions about representation kept cropping up in between the lines of our conversation. Why was I interested in filming from the perspective of the machine? Who was going to do the filming? What was my status as an artist? And how would the workers be visible in the images? By performing the encounter live, as a lecture performance, I attempt to make its social dimension as tangible as possible. While the written testimony is read out through a microphone, I carry a projector in such a way that it echoes the posture of a leaf blower, and project the images on the wall, ceiling, and floor. In the interplay between the two performers, between the reading of the text and the projection of the image, this performance re-enacts some of the interaction that took place between myself and the leaf blowers.