PATRICK PELJHAN

WORK

ABOUT

QUARTZVideo installation 2026QUARTZ is a video installation consisting of a documentary film with the same name. 
The starting point for this work was my grandmother’s old wristwatch collection. In the 1970s, my grandmother worked as a Yugoslav guest worker in the watch industry in Pforzheim—a city whose history is closely tied to the manufacture of watches and jewelry.
The introduction and widespread adoption of more precise and cost-effective quartz technology led to profound upheavals in the watch industry worldwide, which also affected Pforzheim:
Production sites were relocated, jobs were lost, and entire
industries disappeared or were outsourced to other regions of the world, such as the Philippines. My grandmother, too, lost her job several times in the watch industry. 

In the form of a personal search for traces of the past, the film and the installation tells the story of what remains: my grandmother’s slowly fading memories of her former jobs, repurposed or vacant company buildings, and the wristwatch collection that my grandmother had acquired, in part, at her former workplaces—watches in the manufacture of which she had, in some cases, been involved. Historical newspaper articles and advertisements paint a complementary picture from a contemporary historical perspective.
In this way, QUARTZ combines the search for family traces with the question of how history is stored in objects and what memories we preserve through them.

©2026 Patrick PeljhanImpressum