10.000 things out of China
‘10.000 things out of China’ is a Taoist way of saying: “Everything that exists is produced.” Mari Bastashevski’s eponymous series follows the flow of ten household commodities between the logistical choke points they pass through before and after reaching the consumer: factories, data infrastructure, maritime security and all other places that control, move and accelerate production.
Following one commodity, Bastashevski would encounter something like this: an Instagram picture of a model with a phone, displayed as an advertisement inside a Foxconn factory, where the same phone is made. The route by which this image travels (underwater fibre cables), the phone from which it has been photographed and the phone it advertises all pass through the exact same locations, crossing each other at their respective automated rhythms. The consumer who is already a producer in this configuration, is one of the logistical knots, a micro port, always mobile and without a final destination.
’10.000 things out of China’ has circumnavigated the globe by sea. After weeks inside a container ship, away from the overstimulation, the certain pace acquires a shape. The engine of a containership may move at 100 revolutions per minute, the speed of a human heart on amphetamine, but the hammock above the deck follows the biorhythm of the ocean wave. After polishing the surface of the ship all day, the sailors still spend hours slow-burning boredom in their cabins. Without glorifying the near slave working conditions, these vanishing spaces where labour still retains its physical forms and is divided from the kind of labour we perform in our ‘free time’, can teach us something about the possibility of boredom, perhaps the only respite we can hope for in a sleepless era of accelerationism.
