LOGISTICS

Where do all the gadgets come from?

We started wondering how they all get here. Kinder eggs, mobile phone circuit boards, coffee machines…? Sometimes the world seems unfathomable. We were fascinated by the fact that the sourcing of just about every object in our surroundings involves almost inconceivable global logistics. Would doing the same freight journey as the products enable us to understand more about the world and the global economy?

Is it possible to get to the source of the things we consume? In 2008, we came up with the idea to follow the reverse journey of a product. Our case was a tiny plastic electronic product, a pedometer. The sort of anonymous clutter that everyday life is full of. Something that just is. We wanted to follow the pedometer from the store in Stockholm where it was bought to the factory in China where it was manufactured. But how? We started by googling the word “logistics”. Four years later we found ourselves on the largest container ship in the world on our way from Sweden to China. We had started the journey by truck to Middle Sweden, then by freight train to the port of Gothenburg, and after four weeks at sea, we filmed from a truck again, this time from the port of Shenzhen to a factory in Bao´an.

A 37 day-long road movie in the true sense of the meaning. The work is about Time and Consumption. It brings to the fore what is often forgotten in our digital, ostensibly fast-paced world: the slow, physical freight transportation that underpins our economic reality. We wanted to convey it in the most direct manner possible in order to share the journey with others. That´s why we recorded the journey in real time and screen it in real time. 37 days and 37 nights, nonstop. LOGISTICS was exhibited in the window of Kulturhuset Stockholm, facing Sergels Torg, between December 1, 2012 and January 6, 2013. The film was shown during the same period of time at the Uppsala City Library. LOGISTICS was shown at the Fringe Film and Video Festival in Shenzhen, China 13-23 December 2014. Under the theme “consumerism”, it was shown in the same program as “The light bulb conspiracy” and “the E-waste tragedy”. LOGISTICS was exhibited at the art festival “Holy Independent Space” in Dresden, Germany 21 June – 12 July 2015. In 2018, it was exhibited at "Hardwired Temporalities: Media, Infrastructure and the Patterning of Time" at the Media of Cooperation Collaborative Research Center, University of Siegen, Germany.

Who are we? We’re Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson, artists and initiators of LOGISTICS. The project was carried out in collaboration with a number of organizations and companies in the worlds of university, transport and culture. Funding for the project was provided by Innovativ Kultur foundation and Kulturbryggan.