I am dancing on the
graves of my slaves
Installation for PARK, Tilburg, NL, 2016
Exhibition: The Times They Are A-Changin'…
The hanging Figure is made of the cut-outs of the floor sculpture.
Die hängende Figur ist aus den Leerstellen des Bodenobjektes erstellt.
Forced labour around the world is embedded in many products. Also in a lot of products I would have a hard time to completely avoid. That would mean no laptop and smartphone, no rubber tires on my car and much more. The chain, connecting my slaves and me looks mostly like this: Slave – Raw Material – Manufacturer – Brand Commodity – Shop - Myself. I can acknowledge it, show respect, but I can not turn the way of living around me. What I can do is the way of small steps towards avoiding consume, and if possible consuming the right things. This is worthwile, but it is of course to slow for the slaves. In this sense, I am made to dance on their graves. The prices of products we buy and own are the result of globaly distributed manufacturing.
We all have heared of the low wages paid for the needlewoman in Tijuana, Mexico or for the Apple electronics production at Foxconn in China or clothing manufacturer in Bangladesh. Despite different documentaions I have seen about forced labour and child labour, I have only a fuzzy idea about what exists around the globe. And especially I don’t often think about myself in supporting it, or benefiting from it. The chain might in many cases be unavoidable, and slave is a strong word. What I mean, is all the desperate living and work conditions of others relating to my consume and my superior conditions of living. Plus, and this is what I try to got to in this installation, the anger it arises over time. T
he devilish system, constructed through debt bondage, low wages, human trafficking, exists not only on the personal level. It also exists on the level between states and between large companies and states. This neo colonial approach of turning countries into sources for cheap labor or markets to dump more products hits home now. It reaches us in the form of refugees, terrorism and causes extremist, anti - establishment positions in Europe
It should not come as a suprise, that a lot of trust in the western elites is lost. Slavery as part of global manufacturing chains might account only as a small part of this, but it describes very well the mechanism of the problem, which has piled up so high, that change seems imminent. It has unsettled people and turned into a package filled with power and anger.
What has happened so far: As Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, it was to become the founding stone of what was to be called Economic science, talking about nations and politics. But Smith had originated as a moral philosopher, his approach onto the market was that of a philosopher who thought to introduce an extended system – the market – into moral philosophy. So the marked was thought of as an instrument of democratisation. The market was played out against nobility, family origin and religion and was the strongest instrument in the rise of the bourgeoisie, the middle classes. The free marked was established in its moral right, and in the long run, it swept everything away, unleashed and unregulated. Different attempts to construct a social capitalism where made, the crisis in America in 1929 lead to the New Deal; John Meynard Keynes proposed a series of tools to deal with the 'animal spirit'; in the 60ies the 'Wirtschaftswunder' in Germany included a good deal of social ideas. In the 70ies with the raising influence of Milton Friedman an the Chicago School of Economics politics changed in the 80ies, and the economic deregulation of the era Thatcher/Reagan lead to complete looseing of any regulations, the Big Bang in the London City 1986 kickstarting it. Furthermore, greed became fashionable, the greedy banker became a holy figure in the 90ies, filling the pages of the newspapers with a new religion. The high time lastet until the crisis in 2008 and what followed. But even if the image of the super wealthy manager has got some scratches by now, the structure has'nt change, only the tone has gotten rougher.
The marked, has long turned into a tool of power, to keep the money where it is. The uncanny and most dangerous part beeing, that it is executed still in the name of democracy. The term free market makes it all to easy. The FREE is constructed by rules which structure the world in the sense of the owning western class. Democracy and the free marked are sold and enforced in a package. Now, in 2016, the world seems to fall apart: New terrorism, refugees, ISIS, the new right wing movements in Europe, the lust for war. Of course it is all tied together, and it seems that they are all rather symptoms than the problem itself. Those symptoms are caused by a disease called unregulated capitalism. And Slavery is part of it.
