LABORAL - CENTRO DE ARTE Y CREACIÓN INDUSTRIAL

globalisation

NANCY DAVENPORT

Coming/Leaving (2008) 
Single-channel projection. 4’ 41”

For the first half of the looping Coming/Leaving, inspired by Claude Lelouch’s cult car film of the 1970s – C’était un rendez-vous, featuring a frantic eight-minute Ferrari drive through the streets of Paris – Davenport mounted a camera on the front of a car to animate a highspeed commute to the Jaguar car plant in Halewood, Merseyside. The car drives through the factory and parks outside it, where workers run and walk out at the end of the day, an homage to the Lumière brothers’ La sortie des usines Lumière [Workers leaving the factory], widely considered the first motion picture screened in public.

Liverpool Animation (2008)
8-channel video. 11’ 50”
Davenport constructs an animated frieze from still photographs of workers, mostly on break, in the Halewood Jaguar factory, which loops across eight monitors in an endless cycle. Against the background of Ford’s recent sale of Jaguar to Indian Conglomerate Tata, the piece reflects on changing conditions and representations of industrial production in a globalized economy.

Blast-Off (2008) 
Single-channel video. 4’ 17”
This animation of still photographs shows factory workers gathering for a company management pep talk. Beginning with the need for a mission statement, the talk turns to redundancy and lower sales figures. As the camera pans assembled workers, the voice-over slowly changes from English into Chinese, a clear reference to the globalisation of the labour force. The camera cuts from the interior meeting to the exterior of the factory, where a countdown for a NASA shuttle launch is in progress. A festive-sounding soundtrack used for the launch is replaced by an important 1930 speech by Léon Blum, “De quoi est né le socialism” [what does socialism originate from]. After liftoff, the shuttle circles the earth, as if seen from the moon, a reference to another iconic work of early French cinema, Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902).

CAO FEI

Whose Utopia? (2006)

Single-channel video. 20’. Courtesy: the artist and Vitamin Creative Space, Canton

Whose Utopia? was shot at OSRAM China Lighting Ltd. factory in the Pearl River Delta, which has led the massive boom in China’s economy since the late 1970s and has drawn workers from throughout China in search of economic opportunities and a better life. The project explores the life of these migrant factory workers and the effects of globalisation on local economies. Cao Fei uses the factory and its production systems as a stage for poetic reflection, juxtaposing heavy machinery with the delicate light bulbs they produce. Pushing the boundaries of normality within the spaces of the factory, she questions the relationship between utopia and the new dreams and realities created by economic “progress.”

GOLDIN + SENNEBY

“In Search of a Story”, 8-part journal by K.D. (2008-2009)

Weekly journal printed in El Comercio.

Text: K.D. Illustration: Johan Hjerpe. Reading area: Ángel Borrego Cubero. Acknowledgements: Dr. Angus Cameron acts as spokesperson for Goldin + Senneby during the international symposium Feedforward. The Angel of History. In Search of a Story by K.D. was first published in Portuguese in the weekly newspaper 28b, part of the 28th São Paulo Biennial

“In Search of a Story” is part of Headless, a multi-tiered project in which Goldin + Senneby self-reflexively investigate a real offshore company called Headless, Ltd. to explore the actual virtualization and globalisation – or de-territorializing – of capital. “In Search of a Story” is the purported journal of K.D. – serialized in eight parts in the Asturian newspaper El Comercio – about the writing of her forthcoming novel, Looking for Headless. Goldin + Senneby create parallel worlds of authorial ambiguity and evasive capital, elaborating a network of believable persona to suggest the fictional corporality of global capitalism.

JENNIFER And KEVIN MCCOY

Big Box I (2007)

Sculpture with electronics. 91 x 91 x 23 cm. Courtesy: Postmasters Gallery, New York

Big Box I is a miniature of an American-style “big box” shopping mall on a slowly rotating turntable. The nearly featureless building facades alternate between a trash-filled wasteland and an overgrown jungle. A single camera films the scene, presenting it on a wall-mounted monitor as a drive-by view –or as seen by Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, as “one single [looping] catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” as he is blown toward the future by the storm of “progress”. What identifiably remains are only the corporate logotypes, implicitly asking about both corporations’ responsibility for the carnage and their role in the “irresistible” future. What is progress now?

RACHAEL RAKENA, FEZ FA’ANANA & BRIAN FUATA

Pacific Wash Up (2003-2004)

Single-channel video, sound. 5’ 47”.

Courtesy: the artists and Bartley and Company Art Performers: Fez Fa’anana, Brian Fuata, Seina & Latai Taumoepeau, Roslyn & Atawhai Whareaitu and Bernadette Awatere. Video camera and post-production: Rachael Rakena

In Pacific Wash Up Maori and Pacific people make landfall on the shore of Sydney’s upscale Bondi beach – human flotsam transported by the ocean currents in plaid, plastic carry bags. The floating performers in Pacific Wash Up playfully represent what is almost a rite of passage for many young islanders: their commonplace migration to Australia, where they have to learn a new language and new culture. Greeted by quizzical looks from unsuspecting joggers and beach-walkers, however, their arrival also conjures a history of cultural alienation, dislocation and displacement often experienced by immigrants. For 26,000 Maori and 43,000 Pacific Islanders living in Sydney alone, the future lies in the balance.

STEPHANIE ROTHENBERG + JEFF CROUSE

 Invisible Threads – A Virtual Sweatshop (2008)

Mixed media installation: Internet (Second Life), video. Project support: Eyebeam, New York; Sundance Film Festival; SUNY Buffalo 2020 Scholars Fund. Large format printer courtesy of Epson

Invisible Threads allows visitors to order designer jeans on-demand through a sweatshop in Second Life. customers go to a retail kiosk, place their orders, watch how their jeans are made virtually on the factory and how they are output back into the real world via a large format printer in the gallery space. The worker-avatars operating the machines are people sitting at computers around the world and profits made from the jeans sales go towards workers’ salaries and operating costs of the factory. Invisible Threads demonstrates both the promise and problematic aspects of a global workforce increasingly engaging in remote virtual labour.

CAREY YOUNG

Product Recall (2007)
Single-channel video, colour, sound. Edition 1/5. 4’ 27”.

Courtesy: the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Actor: Morgan Deare. Camera: Peter Emery. Sound: Dave Hunt

In Product Recall, we see the artist in a session with a psychoanalyst who asks her to match from memory a series of advertising slogans with their corresponding brand. The slogans are those of well-known global companies (many of them active as art sponsors), which brand themselves around concepts of “imagination” or “inspiration”. Carey Young’s video captures the essence of the information economy by illustrating how cultural content is co-opted by corporations to define their public profile. Creativity becomes linked to products, which in turn increases the corporation’s value as a cultural player. Product Recall humorously unveils this process by having the artist – traditionally seen as embodiment of creativity and imagination – undergo therapy to address the corporate takeover of ideas.