Born Again Labor Museum

BALM is an ongoing project inherited by Tish Markley and Adam Turl. Check out our sibling website: Locust Review.

Artifacts + Wounded Tools

Wounded Tool 326501-T - Box Grater (wrapped in a poem by Michael Linaweaver): Abandoned after the mass marketing of pre-packaged shredded cheese, this box grater fell into a deep depression. Unchecked it will deprive middle-class white people of the shredded cheese they 'need' for their 'fajitas,' and will turn grated food material into aluminum filings. It has been wrapped in the poem '2046' to ameliorate its psychological pain. (July 2020)

Wounded Tool 32593-T – Bee Smoker (bandaged in a poem by Alexander Billet) - When the last bees died, the bee smoker filled itself with crystal meth in a failed suicide attempt. Unchecked it will float around the countryside getting people high, but only if they don’t want to be, and especially if they suffer from anxiety disorder. The Wounded Tool Library is attempting to teach the bee smoker to only get people high with their consent. Until then its pain is being managed with poem bandaging.

Wounded Tool 32590-92-T - Harmonicas When the last human being who remembered Leadbelly’s “We Shall Be Free” died, this group of harmonicas went into a sort of psychosis. They have been put into suspended animation in Whiskey in hopes that a cure can be found. If exposed to the air they will begin a rendition of “Gloomy Sunday,” causing mass suicides within a 3.5 mile radius.

Wounded Tool 32596-8-T - Sickles Like most sickles, these artifacts grew tired of harvesting crops and cutting weeds long before they were replaced by electrical and motorized tools. After misunderstanding Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass – a book very popular among sickles – these artifacts aspired to become poets. The sickles, however, are only capable of harvesting words from already existing poems. Before being captured by the Wounded Tool Library these sickles harvested most of the poetry in the St. Louis public library.

Cyber-Brechtian Collage + Painting