The Lowell Re:Offering

Conjuring the ghosts of Lowell for the second time

The Lowell Re:Offering is an ongoing publishing project that takes the form of a scripted play. Its premise is a contemporary reading of published text by female factory workers of a Mill Factory in Lowell, Massachusetts. The original periodical The Lowell Offering was published between 1840-1845, presenting a depository of poetry, fiction, reflections on labor and employment conditions. While The Offering might be seen as an instance of an emancipatory process, by employing the genre of horror, the Re:offering asks to hold it together with the context of its production: the settler colony; enslaved people's labor; the factory and exploitative mechanisms; the institute of marriage all embody violent forms of societal reproduction. The summoning of the ghosts of Lowell, unveiled the mundanity of the reproductive catastrophe. A catastrophe of repetition and of separateness, in which the emancipation of one body is entangled with the oppression of another.

by Sonia Kazovsky
Design Daria Kiseleva
Installation Oded Yadin Rimon
Special 3D thanks to Omri Bigetz