A Miracle at the Assembly Line is a zine developed for The Factory, a site-specific exhibition curated by Rameesha Azeem at the Sundar Industrial Estate in Lahore (2022). The zine is an original work of speculative fiction about a miracle that takes place at the assembly line of a shoe factory. The story draws coded analogies between a factory and a place of organised worship (insofar as both involve the idea of answering to a higher power and both are characterised by an indifference to private vicissitudes, which prayer or the repetitive work at the assembly line aims to quell). In a Barthesian sense, the factory is also the site of miraculous transformations, of alchemical procedures through which raw and enigmatic matter is turned into ductile material, like plastic, and, in turn, functional goods.

These ideas find pictorial representation in this Xeroxed zine, which, through its large number of copies tucked around the exhibition site, aimed to evoke the ubiquity of miracle tales in Pakistani/ South Asian culture.