Go Soft

In tune with its title, the video work Go Soft by Valerie Snobeck is initially perceived through a gentle soundscape that is generated by the hand movements of a watchmaker and fills the exhibition space. In meticulous steps, fingers open a mechanical movement, disassemble it into its individual parts, and reassemble it after cleaning. Valerie Snobeck presents this process in its entirety, like a parable leading from the object to entropy and back again, without any cuts or interpolations, keeping the audience’s gaze fixed on the craftsman’s workplace. For exactly one hour, a detailed and minute procedure unfolds, in which the actual function of the watch is momentarily suspended, whereas the passage of time expands for the viewer so that it seemingly becomes tangible. Only when the watch starts running again does the video’s time stop—to immediately start again in the loop.

In Go Soft, the gaze is never averted from the craftsman and his tools. Such a focused perspective on practices can also be found in the filmic works of directors Harun Farocki or Darcy Lange, which record labor as it is expanding in time, without the use of dramaturgical elements. In Valerie Snobeck’s work, the watch takes on the dual role of both object and time base. A central instrument of industrialization, the clock made production and workers measurable, turning their steps and hand movements into material that could be optimized further and further. The clock became a symbol of modernity, defining progress as a forward motion. At the midpoint of Go Soft, the engraved lettering of the oil giant Shell, which distributed the watch as a corporate freebie in the 1940s, appears on a gear buried in the movement. The promotional promise was that the watch ran on the company’s oil—and was therefore particularly efficient and durable. This claim is literally deconstructed in Go Soft, unearthing the technological euphoria of those decades as the origin of political and ecological crises that continue into the present.