As younger generations equipped with smartphones enter the construction industry, social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok are becoming informal stages for workers to document their craft. They film themselves at work, their environment, the machinery they use, the skills they showcase, and the local techniques they employ, offering followers a behind-the-scenes look at processes that are usually inaccessible to the public. These videos are instructive and weirdly satisfying. They reflect a natural match between construction and social media: both involve staging and repeated gestures that can take on the quality of performance. Within the frame of a phone camera, the construction site becomes a stage where a worker, or sometimes a machine, demonstrates precision, skill, and improvisation.
Since 2018, I’ve been collecting short video clips from social media that show construction work, material processes, and ways of making. They’re all between eight and twenty-seven seconds long, recorded on phones, and posted by people working on-site. In some clips, the act of self-documentation is also captured. These come from workshops, backyards, rural and urban environments, and construction sites. Even though many appear to be situated in the Global South, their precise location is rarely disclosed, and through constant resharing, re-uploading, and altering, much of their original context becomes impossible to trace.
While they often depict labor carried out in shared, physical communities, their circulation pulls them further away from those contexts, disconnected from the hands and places that produced them. This creates a strangeness in how we consume the clips: we are offered access to this labor through its documentation, but at a distance. We are given a window, but we can’t be sure where it looks onto. This produces an unease that sits alongside the satisfaction of watching. Within this context, the human, algorithmic process of editing—sorting, sequencing, and arranging what the feeds continuously scatter and erase—has the potential to shift our perception of both the clips themselves and the forms of labor they document.
In establishing this archive of more than 600 clips, what has become evident is the consistency of their disappearance. Compiling these videos is not to fix these clips into a definitive archive, but to pause them within their circulation—to hold them still, and to make them visible as an event in their own right. These fragments aren’t archives in the formal sense. They’re ephemeral, low-res, sometimes funny, sometimes precise. But they speak a language of labor, of skill, and of rhythm. They also capture the pleasure in observing spaces where people and machines work together: actions in which workers appear almost machine-like, or machines become extensions of the body.
