A heavy, heavy duty was first shown in 2016 at the independent art venue Les Complices* in Zurich. Founded as an association in 2002 and operating under a rotating curatorship ever since, in 2016 Les Complices* understood “cultural work as a practice that critically examines working and living conditions, forms of racism and exclusion in Western societies, heteronormativity, and capitalism and wishes to actively participate in these discourses.” (Kunsthalle Zürich, 2016). With A heavy, heavy duty, the artists Stefanie Knobel and Angela Wittwer realized a gender-fluid, privilege-critical, techno-utopian, and posthuman sci-fi story (according to Ines Kleesattel, 2018) at this location and combined it with excerpts from travel and research reports, transcripts of conversation, data and explanations on cotton production, trade, and processing between India and Switzerland from the early 19th century to the present, such as the Volkart brothers.






The collaboration between Stefanie Knobel and Angela Wittwer began with a joint imagining and writing process in the summer of 2016 in northern Iran. The resulting eight text figures were spoken by the actress Anna-Katharina Müller and, together with sound recordings of and with textiles, could be heard as an audio loop at Les Complices*.



As part of the exhibition, a textile disco took place on two separate dates, set to the rhythms of textile sounds and the looms of Lodikheda, Santipur, and Neuthal.

The text of the work appears in the publication Writing the body with the body – Essays, Texts and Performances (Volume B) by Stefanie Knobel.