A performance installation on shipping and the value of things.
October 6, 2023 Godsbanen, Aarhus, DK
POST explores the four-week journey of a shipping container from Asia to Europe, and the four-week period it usually takes to begin recovery from a traumatic shock. Through sound, text and a large-scale ultra-low resolution video, the work examines the shipping of things as a performance of carrying meaning in a time of loss.
After a traumatic event, such as the sudden loss of a loved one, the body and mind can experience acute stress. This state typically lasts for up to four weeks and may involve feelings of anxiety, intense fear, and numbness. The process can feel slow, hopeless, and painful.
Similarly, the journey of a shipping container from Asia to Europe also takes approximately four weeks. Only around 5000 containerships transport the majority of newly produced goods worldwide. The journey is slow and routine, yet crucial for the global economy.
The work explores what occurs during these two four-week journeys – the mental and the physical. Both journeys are largely invisible to others besides the traveler. They only manifest as byproducts: the ship’s waves, mood swings. The ordinariness of receiving an online order on your doorstep, the unnoticed global transit of the object. The mundaneness of waking up one day, no longer with the acute feeling of nausea. Gradually, invisibly, slowly, perhaps finding happiness again. Arrived.
The ultra-low resolution video explores the image as a thing that conveys a signal and a message across time and space. How much, or little, information is necessary to convey meaning? How is significance attached to images and things? The visual language of the work is cold and limited: communicative, without a clear message, an empty container waiting to be filled with meaning. Both a love letter and a death certificate is written on a piece of paper. The work considers the image as an object that is shipped globally through a vast network. It incorporates found imagery from the shipping industry, including text, radar signals, QR codes, as well as literal and schematic representations of waves.
As with all of my work, the piece departs from a transdisciplinary performance tradition, and as such the piece is intended to serve both as a performance piece and a standalone video work.
The initial version of POST was shown at Godsbanen, Aarhus (DK) as a performance installation in October 2023, in a special version featuring the Nigerian dancer and performance artist Deborah Aiyegbeni.