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'Clocks on the Floor': towards re-spatializing time in Rex Trueform, is a long essay publication that explores ideas around how the 20th century African factory has vividly spatialised the entanglement of modern constructions of space, time, personhood, labour and idleness. It interprets, amongst other, the use and the design of the 55 minute hour, a technique Rex Trueform implemented during the 1 940s to increase productivity on the factory floor. I argue here that it formed part of a general modernist civilizing and disciplining of black bodies.  The 55 minute hour has now been used in the title of 'Live Architecture: the 55 minute hour', an event made possible by Off Plan International curators Mary Corrigall, Amy Watson and Neliswe Xaba. They have invited a host of amazing artists including: Zyma Amien, Igshaan Adams, Bernardo Guiamba, Jenevieve Lyons, Gerald Machona, Francesco Nassimbeni and Richard De Jager, Buhlebezwe Siwani and James Webb to produce work for the...

Open House, exhibitions and films. O ur engagement with the Rex Trueform factories in Salt River has continued. Between 2014-2015 we organised an Open House of the buildings, organised an on site exhibition and produced a short film. The film, which can be viewed below, raises questions of identity formation and modernist space, a main research preoccupation of ours. Thank you to MUTI films for the production, Mark Donough for his descriptions of factory life and Sandy Policansky for her generous time and insight into her father, Max Policansky's life. Documentation of a modern factory through event, exhibition and film.     Open House to the Rex Trueform factory, a space that has become a point of reflection on its past, once a place of intense urban industry, as well as a point of entry into the ways modern architecture played a role in shaping our societies and our identities.

Ongoing research about Max Policansky's work culminated in a tour in September 2011. For the full article click here. For the OH13 Tour brochure click  here .

I’ve always been OBSESSED with the modernist factories down in Salt River. Like empty cruise-liners they dock next to the congested Main road where taxi’s wind through buses and cars. My friend Rikus Mundey did his thesis on the reuse of the Rex Trueform building, (originally called the Judge Clothing Factory) designed by Max Policansky in 1937 – yep that’s an oldie, alright. A year later Policansky also did the factory next door – the Cavalla Cigarette Factory for his father. The two, because of various extensions and later renovations, look like one big building on Victoria Rd Salt River. The buildings are abandoned because Rex Trueform retrenched most of the staff about 5 years ago (instead of manufacturing clothes and creating employment, the owners decided to import from China and sell at their retail shop – Queenspark. Sad, I know, especially considering that most of the workers were the single breadwinners of many of the households on the Cape Flats). According to Rikus he once ...