The work draws its title from a personal tale. Ruth, the artists’ grandmother, earned her livelihood producing mechanisms for industrial clocks in the Burk factory in the Black Forest. There she drilled holes in gears for over three decades. An infamous protagonist in the Burk factory was known as The Stopper. Once a month, he would monitor the workers’ productivity and efficiency, one at a time. On a small stool, he sat by Ruth, and audited her production and assembly pace, stopping the time with the finishing of each tiny element. Careful not to work either faster or slower than usual, she would work on the mechanics in complete synchronicity with The Stopper. With this act a tiny universe was created: The Stopper stopping time in the time production factory.
In an era marked by efficiency protocols, digitisation, and decreasing attention spans, Jasmijn Visser’s work The Stopper pays tribute to mechanics and manual labor. The Stopper is a website that renders visible the universal notion of the violence within the act of stopping.
A project by Jasmijn Visser in collaboration with Jungki Beak, designed by S†ëfan Schäfer, programming by Daniel Farr, and commissioned by Kunsthalle Amsterdam in co-production with the Moscow Biennial For Young Art. A subsequent edition of The Stopper was be shown at Song Eun Project Space in Seoul September 2018, in collaboration with Delfina Foundation.