In collaboration with xtine burrough.
What: The Radium Girls is an emerging story-telling piece which juxtaposes stories about technology used to produce exit signs with the story of the Radium Girls. Iterations included an exit sign tour, a self-guided exit sign tour in which the “stops” were audio files contained inside bird cages, and the current interactive sculpture .
When: Fall 2016 – 2019.
Display history:
April 2019 – Patterns exhibition, part of the conference “What is Technology” at the University of Oregon, in Portland, OR.
July 2018 – C ARTE C gallery in Museo Del Traje at xCoAx, Madrid, Spain.
November 2017 – HASTAC conference, Orlando, FL.
May 2017 – Plano ArtFest, Plano, TX
May 2017 – Central Trak, Dallas, TX.
March 2017 – School of Arts, Technology and Emerging Communication, University of Texas at Dallas.
February 2017 – 16th Biennial Symposium of Arts and Technology at The Ammerman Center for the Arts and Technology at Connecticut College, New London, CT.
November 2016 – Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX.
Publishing History: We wrote extensively about this project and presented it in different conferences. It was published in the proceedings of the 16th Biennial Symposium of Arts and Technology at The Ammerman Center for the Arts and Technology at Connecticut College in 2017, and in the proceedings of xCoAx 2018.
The Radium Girls project, in its multiple iterations, juxtaposes stories about technology used to produce exit signs with the story of the Radium Girls. The Radium Girls were immigrant young female factory workers of the 1920s who were exposed to radium—using it to paint watch dials — and fell deadly ill. The workers fought (and lost) a long judicial battle over reparations, which did, however, help to establish new worker rights laws and radioactive materials safety laws. We instigate participants to connect the past to the present, and to consider how relationships and legacies of class, gender, production and socio-technological standards impact the human condition.
We invite the public to explore an omnipresent and often overlooked piece of public architecture: the exit sign, connecting scientific information about the construction and standards of exit signs in the United States (which once glowed with radium) with the struggle of the Radium Girls. For our latest iteration, we recorded five women from diverse backgrounds narrating pieces that we wrote by mixing information about exit signs with quotes from Kate Moore’s book The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women. Each narration is played when a participant touches a brush to one of five watch dials hanging from the exit sign in our participatory audio sculpture. Installed on the sign is a Bare Conductive touch board that stores and plays the audio files when the brush makes a connection with a watch dial, closing the circuit between the watches and the exit sign.
All pictures by me otherwise noted.
Letícia Ferreira 