La Nonpareille extends Batia Suter’s site-specific installation at TU Delft, where she immersed herself in the library’s archive of glass slides. In an age when images are endlessly generated, sorted, and recombined by algorithms, Suter insists on the slowness and tactility of manual work: tirelessly compiling and associating images by hand. The archive she engages with—glass plates produced between 1900 and 1960 for lectures in Mechanical Technology—bears the marks of use and time. They document machines, industrial materials, and production processes from an era of accelerating mechanisation, when human labor itself was increasingly being handed over to machines.
Suter reanimates this material, transforming it into a visual meditation on the entanglement of humans and machines, and on the ways technology shapes perception, work, and everyday life. Many of the book’s compositions take the form of layered montages, where images overlap to produce hybrid forms and unexpected associations. These juxtapositions mirror both the inventive logic of industrial progress and the imaginative potential of recombining fragments by hand.
The TU Delft Library maintains a varied collection of glass slides, once essential to academic teaching. Produced on glass substrates and projected during lectures, they were assembled by professors to illustrate technical knowledge in the fields of Mechanical and Maritime Engineering and Electrical Engineering. Within these sets, students encountered the workings of machines, the properties of industrial materials, and the processes of production—from glass and ceramics to textiles, paper, milling, and printing.
This archive captures a moment when education sought not only to describe machines, but to understand process technologies deeply—so as to refine tools and shift the burden of labor from manual to mechanical. In Suter’s hands, however, these images are liberated from their original didactic function. Through a deliberate, manual act of reconfiguration, she turns them into a living atlas: a reflection on past industrial transformations, and on the persistence of human imagination in a time increasingly structured by automation.
