(Soft)Power

100 X 500 X 12 cm

Coal, fake Gucci fabric and one day’s sweatshop work.

2009

This installation was made during an art-residency in Beijing. It touched upon various overlapping subjects that I experienced (and activated) based on the growing-concealed advanced capitalism in China at the time. Luxury brands’ flagship stores and international food chains were opening (for new-millionaires and international visitors) while still maintaining a “communist” rural/impoverished/docile population in the outskirts of the city. A massive political, cultural, and economy contrast.

The work consisted of an in-situ sculpture -merging both realities and subsequently, the geographical movement/transfer of raw material to Europe. Thus, inverting/subverting the meaning, fabrication process and labour-per-hour costs. Ultimately, decontextualizing the material and altering the final fake-smuggled-luxury-product’s value through art’s economic system.

Territory: As the city limits were expanding, the previously rural townships were forced by the government to constantly move. In order to build movie-sets like neighbourhoods and luxury restaurants only the wealthy and foreigners could afford.

Extractivism and environmental health: The residency complex (gated community) surroundings which included the township, had a strong smell and a heavy black smoke/fog from burning coal for cooking and heat. By the end of 2009, the country was first in the world ranking of domestic coal consumption.

Body-population-management and Economy: Around the Olympics, China started an image-wash campaign to implement laws policing from bodily manners/behaviours such as spitting, to the production and commercialization of luxury brand imitations.

Underpaid labour-force exploitation: Production of luxury commodities in “sweatshops”. I found and negotiated in a market the illegal Gucci material by the meter -not easily available, and then sourced and discussed/contracted their confection at a one of these specialized factories.

>The factory image was taken from the office without permission, therefore the main industrial-grid-like work spaces cannot be seen