The Afterlife of Working Gloves and why Mother Nature doesn’t wear them

For over two years we made it our business to document abandoned working gloves on the streets of NYC. The feelings and thoughts that surrounded this activity connected to the ways his family relates to Gregor Samsa as a cockroach, or whatever Franz Kafka intended him to be in The Metamorphosis after his transformation from a productive citizen to a useless insect. When Gregor can't grant them a comfortable life-style any longer, his family starts to resent and hate the once loved and respected provider, finds him disgusting.

The daily ritual of documenting discarded working gloves gave form to the disappointment, anger and surprise of perceiving something as being treated unfairly. We started to rely on the gloves as “actual evidence”, read them as fall-out of the resentment, injustice, anxiety and destruction that was in the air. We took about 1,200 photographs and produced a video through which we tried to understand if this “fall-out” was part of a natural trajectory, historically speaking. We approached the question formally by comparing the shapes, textures and colors with compositions in nature.

— eteam