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.