The excess The factory

Leslie Kaplan

The Excess – The factory is Leslie Kaplan's record of the "thing" that is the factory. A thing made up of concrete, brick, sheet metal, corridors, sheds, courtyards, workshops, toilets, smells of iron and rubber, grass among scrap metal. But also the café where people go to drink coffee, the bicycle they take at five o'clock in the morning, the apron they wear every day and take with them to wash on Friday evening, the bus stop opposite the factory gate. Kaplan had to find a tone that was as concrete as it was flat to make the bareness of gestures and things within the uniform space-time of the factory experienceable through language.

Its strength lies in the fact that it manages to conjure up the compelling image of a hallucinatory factory cosmos without place or history in a subdued style. The nine series of the collection are not called 'circles' for nothing; on a realistic level, it is about the nine hours of the working day – but on a second level, the nine circles of Dante's Inferno chime in.