<p>In a former espadrille factory closed for years, abandoned objects, clothes and machines come to life to evoke the forty-five years of life of the factory and its workers. Former workers, former managers, and residents who lived by the rhythm of factory life recall with emotion the hours of hard work interspersed with joy, the strike pickets and union struggles, the resistance to successive factory closures and unemployment. Among them, Jacqueline makes her eight-year-old grandson Ulysse understand the place of the factory in her life. The factory, which was closed and left abandoned for a long time, was finally dismantled and demolished. The day the building is razed to the ground, the whole landscape of the city changes, leaving a gaping void for the inhabitants. The children of the school, worried and disoriented, wonder about this disappearance. The headmaster then asks them to draw the factory as they have always seen it or as they have been told about it, so that they will not forget it. Ulysse offers his drawing to his grandmother Jacqueline to console her: it shows the factory teeming with life, as she knew it. This is how this working-class memory is passed on from one generation to the next.</p>

Object theatre

Actor and puppet

All audiences

Chaffin François

France

Oloron-Sainte-Marie

Printed

Factory

Workers’ memory

Industrial past

Remembrance

Machine

Testify

Labour

Comical

Pathetic

Lyrical

French

Des voix sortant des penderies de vestiaire

Voice

Worker

Ouvrière

Patron

Hand

Le dernier ouvrier de la dernière espadrille

Bird

Grand-mère

Child

Metonymy (mode of characterisation)

Chorality

Chorus

Ni bleu ni blouse

Neither blue nor blouse work clothes