EIN NEUES PRODUKT

For a whole year, Harun Farocki follows the meetings of Quickborner Team (QT), a Hamburg-based consulting firm that is developing a new “product”. The time of fixed, personalised offices is over. Welcome to the firms whose 80,000 square metres offers a nomadic office to all their employees, with authorised work-time jogging to boost their productivity. The coloured drawings of a “visual facilitator” (sic) help to flesh out the concept, but the newspeak trips up on a carpet of metaphors: corporate culture is a “coat”, the boss an “oyster” able to “take in a grain of sand to produce a pearl”, and an architectural design competition a “fence that nobody wants to paint but, in the end, that everyone wants to paint”… Both grotesque and off-putting, this rhetoric masks a coercive ideology and sends a chill down the spine: when QT decides to implement “in-house” the flexibility inherent to its concepts of space and line relationships, a good old note of paternalism steps into the design of their new attire – with brown clothes, to boot. (Charlotte Garson)