passing & packaging. Mount Zong & General Tubman Transverberation, 2018
Installation with cotton sailcloth, commodities, pebbles, weaving loom boat shuttle with text, steel chain, freight box, light, sound
Dimension variable, duration: 8:06 min
with Caroline Ann Baur
Art Container, Zurich Switzerland, 2018
link to audio
For this exhibition, the two artists Vanessà Heer and Caroline Ann Baur use two containers that are in dialogue with one another. They talk about logistics in a capitalist world economy with marginalized producers in the global south and ever-present shop shelves on the other side of the ocean. In between is distribution, which is always also a distribution of labour. Logistics has a centuries-old genealogy that goes back to the transatlantic slave trade. Even today, a large part of the world's human population has not been able to leave the status of commodities entirely, and perhaps in the age of total "access", the exploitation of our most private desires, we are more objects than subjects - imaginary objects, in constant passing. Ships, the symbolic and factual wings of slavery, colonization and the world market, always carried the "fantasy in the hold": the desire for freedom and the revolt of desire.
While in the first container «Mount Zong» has to be balanced around a sculptural mountain of responsibility over painfully crunching ground, referring to the insurance scandal of the slave ship Zong, the second tells a story of freedom. Here the «General Tubman Transverberation», a decentralized choir of five voices on the poetics of escape and flight, resounds.