UNFOLDING CONTAINERS
Special Guided Tours | Nordwestbahnhof & TBA21, Vienna
Special Guided Tours | Nordwestbahnhof & TBA21, Vienna
Photo: Hieslmair | Zinganel
TBA21, in cooperation with Tracing Spaces, hosts a series of special guided tours discussing global logistic infrastructures and the pivotal role they have played in anthropogenic transformation. The tour will integrate Allan Sekula’s documentary work and research with a walk-through the infrastructure, architecture, and history of the adjacent logistical area at Nordwestbahnhof.
“If there is a single object that can be said to embody the disavowal implicit in the transnational bourgeoisie’s fantasy of a world of wealth without workers, a world of uninhibited flows, it is this: the container, the very coffin of remote labor-power. And like the table in Marx’s explanation of commodity fetishism, the coffin has learned to dance.”
– Allan Sekula
Stretching well over two decades Allan Sekula’s seminal research-based documentary filmmaking, photography, theoretical writing and teaching, on the maritime industries (currently discussed as part of TBA21’s latest exhibition Allan Sekula: OKEANOS) has sketched an intricate perspective on late global capitalism’s capacity to move indeterminable quantities of matter, heavy industrial machinery and human labor – a capacity unprecedented historically. As Sekula notes, since its invention in the 1950s, the modern cargo container has revolutionized intercontinental cargo logistics. It operates as a central unifying organizational unit that is applied in logistic infrastructures all over the globe. The modularity and uniformity of the cargo container globally has enabled an push for automatization, fostering an increased reliance on heavy machinery and state of the art digital information systems.
Allan Sekula discussed the groundbreaking innovations of cargo industries in close relation to resource extraction, the social transformations and political struggles and the increasing manifestations of our global ecological crisis. His thought articulates and gives a frame to abstract and complex relationships that lie at the base of anthropogenic change. In the present moment the cargo container lies at the heart of a technological development that continues to render human labor both increasingly invisible and increasingly unnecessary, while at the same time giving birth to the behemoths of globalization’s heavy cargo industries, inhabiting and connecting both the oceans and the landmasses of the Anthropocene, ensuring the reach of global trade and internationalized production far off into every corner of the world.
“If there is a single object that can be said to embody the disavowal implicit in the transnational bourgeoisie’s fantasy of a world of wealth without workers, a world of uninhibited flows, it is this: the container, the very coffin of remote labor-power. And like the table in Marx’s explanation of commodity fetishism, the coffin has learned to dance.”
– Allan Sekula
Stretching well over two decades Allan Sekula’s seminal research-based documentary filmmaking, photography, theoretical writing and teaching, on the maritime industries (currently discussed as part of TBA21’s latest exhibition Allan Sekula: OKEANOS) has sketched an intricate perspective on late global capitalism’s capacity to move indeterminable quantities of matter, heavy industrial machinery and human labor – a capacity unprecedented historically. As Sekula notes, since its invention in the 1950s, the modern cargo container has revolutionized intercontinental cargo logistics. It operates as a central unifying organizational unit that is applied in logistic infrastructures all over the globe. The modularity and uniformity of the cargo container globally has enabled an push for automatization, fostering an increased reliance on heavy machinery and state of the art digital information systems.
Allan Sekula discussed the groundbreaking innovations of cargo industries in close relation to resource extraction, the social transformations and political struggles and the increasing manifestations of our global ecological crisis. His thought articulates and gives a frame to abstract and complex relationships that lie at the base of anthropogenic change. In the present moment the cargo container lies at the heart of a technological development that continues to render human labor both increasingly invisible and increasingly unnecessary, while at the same time giving birth to the behemoths of globalization’s heavy cargo industries, inhabiting and connecting both the oceans and the landmasses of the Anthropocene, ensuring the reach of global trade and internationalized production far off into every corner of the world.