Thank you.
So we're on known fields.
Tonight we're going to tell you five stories from the Anthropocene.
These five stories are going to be told pretty much entirely through footage that Kate and
I have collected along expeditions through the landscapes produced by and for technology.
Because we're interested in order to understand the complexity of some of the sites and contexts
that you'll see upstairs in the exhibition, to understand the complexity of the world
that we've kind of created for ourselves, it's not enough to just stare at the screen
looking at remote satellite images or following an interesting person on Twitter, but you
have to get out onto the ground and rummage through the reality of what these landscapes
are and document them and catalogue and collect and chronicle the stories that these sites
hold.
And tonight we're going to try and take you through some of those sites and talk to you
through some of those stories.
Could we kill the lights up on the stage as well?
Thanks.
So Unknown Field is an ematic design studio that ventures out on expeditions into the
shadows cast by the contemporary city to uncover the alternative worlds, alien landscapes,
industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness set in motion by the powerful push and pull
of the world's desires.
The dislocated landscapes we survey, the iconic and the ignored, the excavated, irradiated
and the pristine are connected to our everyday lives in surprising and complicated ways.
They're embedded in global systems that form a vast network of elusive tendrils, twisting
thread-like over everything around us, criss-crossing the planet, connecting the mundane to the
extraordinary.
Unknown Fields make provocative objects and films from this expedition work, exploring
the dispersed narratives that coalesce to form a contemporary city.
Our material things set in motion this vast planetary scale infrastructure and they carve
holes like canyons and they move mountains and they remake our world from the scale of
the pixel to the scale of the planet.
Our contemporary cities cast shadows that stretch far and wide.
So we tell tales from the dark side of the city, stories from a notional road trip through
a reimagined city that stretches across the earth.
We create portraits of a place that sits between dock and between future.
A city of fragments of drone footage and hidden camera investigations, of interviews and speculative
narratives, of toxic objects reimagined landscapes and distributed matter from distant
signs.
The dark side of the city is a collection of stories from the constellation of elsewhere
that are conjured into being by the city's wants and needs, its fears and dreams.
So across the last nine years, Unknown Fields have undertaken 14 expeditions through the
distributed territories that lie behind the scenes of the contemporary city.
So we've travelled aboard a cargo ship following the trail of our electronics through the South
China Seas, to the shipping ports, the factory floors and the rare earth excavations of China.
We've travelled on a dustblown road trip through the gold and aluminium sites of the
Australian Outback.
Travelled through the irradiated wilderness of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, to the precarious
wilderness in the wild west gemstone landscapes of Madagascar, through the lithium fields
and the charged landscapes of Bolivia and Chile and the climate change landscapes of
far north Alaska.
It's important to travel to all the sites on the edges of the world where our technology
begins and ends their lives.
And these journeys construct this notional joining from the point of sail to the hole
in the ground.
A journey stitched together using footage from some of the places that we've visited
across the last few years.
So tonight we're going to take you on a tour through these landscapes.
We're going to narrate a set of five stories which connects all these sites to the contents
of your pockets, to the little pieces of technology you carry around.
Our cities are extraordinary constellations of products, goods and technologies.
From the smallest and most inconsequential of objects to the most intricate and complex,
these material things set in motion a vast planetary scale infrastructure.
Our cities cast shadows that stretch far and wide.
And in a world of bites and bitcoins, cyberspace and clouds, 90% of the world's cargo still
travels by sea.
It's not beamed or teleported or conjured into existence along strings of optic fiber,
but rather dragged across the planet in heaving steel megaships, gizzards full with gillustling
gadgets and gizmos from distant lands.
So the secret life of objects span across this notional factory floor that reaches from
the High Street Pound Shop all the way to the resource fields of the Far East.
And here, aboard this ship, we travel to China and beyond, tracing the shadows of the world's
desires across the China seas and along supply chains and cargo routes to explore the dispersed
choreographies and the atomized geographies that geographical sea trade brings into being.
So these are the contours of our distributed city, stretched across the earth, from the
hole in the ground to the High Street shelf.
Our journey through East Asia marks a cross-section of this supply chain, from source to sea.
We follow the roots of this and that, of bits and bobs and thingy-majigs.
It's been just over 45 years since the Apollo moon landings, and some would have it that
we are failing to build big anymore, but stand on the bridge of a container ship docked in
a megaport in Korea, and it's clear that that's just not true.
5,000 ships make up the global container ship fleet, 3.6 million containers are in motion
worldwide.
To the surface of our planet's oceans, the century was a space of mystery and myth, of
expanse and desolation, but now all these sites that we're just seeing have been rationalized.
Once an enigmatic or inspiring place, the sea had become a zone of efficiency, little more
than another channel for the automated supply chain network.
When aboard this ship, the captain tells us that years ago the sea used to be filled with
a kind of phosphorescent algae that would glow when the waters were disturbed by the
boat passing through it.
He says, we would leave this luminous green trail behind us in the water, as motors churned
up the algae, toilets have flushed with seawater and you could turn the lights off in the bathroom
and flush the loo, and the whole room would glow neon green.
And nobody on these ships knows what's inside the containers.
The ship captain and the port side crane operators, they've just been made obsolete, and now they're
just passengers inside these mega machines, their bodies repurposed as a component in
a landscape-scaled robot that stacks all these containers ready for transport and bringing
our goods all the way home.
The ship being built is called the New Dream, it's almost finished.
The ship yard worker says, we use GPS-guided cranes to move the larger sections of the
ships in the assembly process.
We then weld the sections together by hand.
These are some of the largest handcrafted objects in human history.
Every welder signs his weld so that if there's a flaw, we can trace it back to who did it.
The component of the ship has a signature of those who made it hidden under the paint.
So before our objects set sail for our stores, they're bought, sold, and traded in the vast
halls of a place called Yiwu International Trade City.
It's a wholesale market the size of a city, and this wholesale market consists of 80,000
shops, all identically sized 2.5m x 2.5m cubes that contain 10 million products that are
scratched across 10 square kilometres.
The minimum order is 100,000, every one of us owns something that's passed through the
wholesale city.
We understand who we are through the trail of objects we leave behind.
Christmas is made in Yiwu, more than 60% of the world's Christmas decorations are here.
That tree lighting up your lounge, those decorations hanging from the ceiling, that novelty stocking
filler you bought for your child, is all made here.
And here in Shenzhen, 90% of the world's electronics are made.
And now we cast our eyes across the human machines of the production line, all choreographed
by efficiency algorithms, and their bodies matched in speed to the conveyor belts that
turn in front of them, in a way these are the real robots of our cities of technology.
So in these sites, through these tours, through these stories, can we start to imagine redesigning
our gadgets and our technologies, not based on how they slide into our pockets, or feel
in our hand, but for the networks they set in motion, or the landscapes and resources
they might distribute.
What could alternative design criteria be for supply chains if they weren't engineered
around these cheap labor mechanisms and material availability?
So we follow the technology here at a village organised around metals and hardware components.
The inhabitants of Gouyu collect the e-race to their houses, surrounding their living,
sleeping and eating spaces, mining their domestic landscapes for lead, germanium, gallium, tin,
nickel and copper, next to the pot of noodles, simmers, the acid bath, dissolving circuit
wafers, separating metals, and flavouring of soup.
And finally, for our last stop in World of Drift, we arrive at the 10 square kilometre
mine tailings waste lake that's filled with a cocktail of acids, heavy metals, carcinogens
and radioactive material that's roughly three back times background radiation.
And China produces so much of the world's rare earth minerals, and two thirds of this
is in bowtoed, and this is some of the first footage of the toxic waste that sits beside
the world's largest rare earth mineral refinery, and we take a selfie with our phones and we
see our reflection in the mirrored screen, because the material to polish its glass and
run its software produces this very lake, and collapse together in this single luminous
surface we see ourselves, and this black, black earth.
And now we brand our technologies with terms like cloud, or the air, or featherweight, but
in reality they're violently wrenched from the earth, and as our personal electronics
tend towards the invisible, they conjure in their shadows this undeniably visible grey
mountain, a one kilometre deep pit, and a 10 square kilometre radioactive tailings lake.
All landscapes that are a counterweight to the apparent immateriality of computing, communications
and electric energy.
So, in this black sludge we've made a set of vases, made from the amount of waste created
in the production of three objects, an iPhone, a MacBook, and the cell of a Tesla electric
car battery.
A new material aesthetic for technologies born of the earth, and in silhouette the three
vases echo highly valuable Ming dynasty porcelain vases.
Ming vases are particularly iconic objects of high value, as well as being artifacts
of international trade.
The Ming dynasty, a one family global superpower, resided over an international network of
connections with trade and diplomacy.
And these three rare earthenware vessels are the physical embodiment of a contemporary
global supply network that displaces earth and weaves matter across the planet.
They represent the undesirable consequences of our material designs.
So we've followed the unmaking of these objects of technology, reversing their journey from
container ships and ports, through wholesalers and factory floors, all the way back to the
banks of the barely liquid radioactive lake in Inner Mongolia, that continually pumped
with the tailings from the rare earth refining process.
The unmaking of our technologies is the making of these vases, carefully crafted from their
toxic byproducts.
So in Treasured Island, unknown fields travels through Madagascar to catalogue the push and
pull of economy and ecology and meet the illegal traders of the world's luxury brands.
One of the planet's most precious ecological treasure is home to one of its poorest nations
and it raises difficult and complex questions about the relationship between necessity and
the world.
Hidden amidst political uncertainty, the islands fragile, unique for ecology, it's being smuggled
out beneath the boat, by boat, jet by jet, rare tortoises leaned in rucksacks, forests
onto the stage in pop star bling.
And as the beat drops and the stage lights strobe, a pop star flashes their designer
bling for the camera in a flurry of choreographed dance moves, and another world away, in a
hole in the ground in the wild west manning town of Illicaca, another choreography of bodies
move in rhythm to dig dirt by hand out of the gemstone mines.
The 70% of the world's gemstones are pulled out of the ground by the human conveyor belt
of Madagascar's fields.
For such a remote island, it contains an extraordinary amount of high value resources.
Precious gems were deposited here by an ancient river that once flowed across Africa before
a tectonic ship ripped it from the mainland to form the island of Madagascar, and the
stones collected in a pocket along the twists and turns of the riverbed, resting patiently
beneath 20 meters of sand and this future of mining boom town.
We dig holes to try and find the river again, they say.
These are the words of Marc Nivera, who's one of the major players in present day Illicaca.
One of the only Europeans in a town, in the town he moved here 18 months ago, chasing
the stones and hunting his fortune.
He is the anonymous face reflected in every piece of jewelry you own.
I like stone better than humans, he says, and I like stone better than money.
In 1999 he drove into Illicaca to live in a tent and watch the place explode.
When he first arrived there was only one building here, and now the landscape is overrun with
almost 100,000 miners.
There's only one road in or out, and it's lined with gem shops and sweaty men with guns
on their hips.
I finance the pit, he says.
Here in Illicaca the land is free and all you need to mine is a local arrangement with
the chiefs and elders.
There is no government here, there is nothing.
There is just thousands of people, but it's the most lonely place in all of Madagascar.
This is the landscape produced from unregulated desires.
If you want to mine with machines you need a formal contract and money for fuel and maintenance.
To dig with people you don't need anything at all, he says, just a bag of rice.
And each worker gets two dollars a day to work in the mines and 50 grams of rice, and
with that one cubic meter of earth equals one gram of gemstone.
Here it's much cheaper to pay workers in rice and it is to buy and maintain mechanical
mining equipment.
The 20 men of his Swiss bank mine shovel dirt in perfect synchronization.
Each paid the price, their bodies repurposed as machines.
This mine took 12 years to dig by hand, and here their movements are traced, mapping the
choreographies of the production line, looking to optimize every movement.
2,880 shovels per day, 5.76 tons per day.
This is my hole, says one of the miners.
I started digging it four years ago, and every hole here was made by our hands.
If you are lucky you find a good sapphire and then you have a good life.
With no luck you die, or you grow old digging holes, and when we find a stone we all go
together to the Sri Lankans to sell it and to split the money, and we don't know what
happens to them or to the stones, we don't know how much money they sell, the money never
comes back to us.
Everyone else with money in this town is Sri Lankan, the cultural relationship to sapphires
has been steeped in Sri Lanka.
Embedded within this tradition, Sri Lankan sapphires sell at a much better price than
Madagascar stones.
If rough, unpolished stones can be smuggled out of the country and back to Sri Lanka,
they can be refined and sold on at an extraordinary markup.
At 6pm the single street town comes alive, as mine is returned from the field for a treacherous
two hour negotiation for the sale of the day's pickings.
They crowd around tiny grilled windows that line the street and watch as Sri Lankan inside
sorts through their finds.
The street is washed with a focus light, a kind of a tiny gem which is shining through
stones looking for imperfections and inclusions, for anything to drop the price.
We find ways to send rough stones out of the country, if I find a good stone I fly back
to Switzerland, I get a certificate on which I can nominate the origin of the stone, I
make much more money if I say I got it from Sri Lanka, he says.
So we imagine the plains full of bars, lifting off from this treasured island, their shoes,
their jacket linings full of shimmering deep blue jewels.
We're not a city, we have no name, no mayor, no bank, no map.
This, I think, goes for Sri Lankan after we put it in the store.
Material production and cultural production have never been separate.
So unknown fields have used the amount of rice the human conveyor belt can
consume in a day to manufacture a precious stone that embodies the systems through which
these worlds are intimately and profoundly connected.
So the red Madagascan rice that's grown endemically on this treasured island is a staple food
of the miners and it's been collected locally and shipped to gem specialists for carbon
analysis and by subjecting the rice to extreme heat and pressure in the laboratory unknown
fields have formed a synthetic stone encoded with the sum of the human conveyor belts labor.
And after manufacture the gemstone has been set into a gold tooth ready for that million
dollars smile and the outrageous lyric.
So from killer jewels to carrots to the nightclub in the glare of this cheeky gold grin we
see the cost of luxury of beauty of a daily allowance of rice of 20 men shoveling at the
bottom of a hole.
Thank you.
The diamond glistens in the light, and mirrored in the facets of the rice diamond, we see
ourselves.
The diamond glistens in the light, and mirrored in the facets of the rice diamond, we see
ourselves in the light, and mirrored in the facets of the rice diamond, we see ourselves.
And to locate the environmental forecasts and the data landscapes of the unknown field
city, the studio now travels to Alaska's far north to visit a territory that sits in the
collective imagination as one of the last remaining goodnesses on the planet.
The here in Alaska climate change is not a condition that's going to play out in any
possible future, but it's a phenomenon that's unfolding in real time, where whale migration
patterns are shifting and coastlines are disappearing and the ice is melting.
And we spend the winter solstice with the climate scientists from around the world who
are all camped up here in the most northern cities on the planet to collect data that's
then fed into climate modelling and the supercomputers, and then informing climate policies further
south.
This is the sound of a supercomputer, the white noise of millions of calculations per second.
From the oracles and orgos of the ancients to the predictive modelling of modern digital
profits, through the ages both wise men and charlatans have claimed to see into the future.
Cultures differ in their concept of time and their attitudes towards the future, which
are central to these acts of prediction.
Alaskan Inuit, informed by ancestral memories of their environment and its patterns, embraced
the uncertainties of the future with a deep belief in their own ability to adapt.
Meanwhile, the world's environmental scientists attempt to assemble their observations into
climate models in order to predict the future as precisely as possible.
So caught between improvisation and premeditation, these cultural relationships with landscape
and time define the future of the north and in turn our cities beyond.
We peer inside the supercomputer to find a set of surreal landscapes, ones that sit between
tradition and technology, the real and the imagined, the present and future.
These landscapes that we're seeing now are narrated by native Alaskan authors and they're
generated from the climate data and modelling software of supercomputer scientists.
And against these images run panoramas of supercomputer infrastructure that simulates
them and the doomsday statistics that we're shouted at with every day.
But for the most part, we try our best to ignore.
And these traditional data visualisations and guilt laden headlines are no longer sufficient
strategies to encourage the cultural shift that's now required.
It's unknown fields have cracked open the black box to pull out the environments the
supercomputers now predicting and imbue them with new narratives.
The indigenous poetry is an alternative methodology for an ever-melting landscape of fear and
hope.
And the panoramas are dramatisations of data, portraits of a world that we may have already
lost or one we are yet to find.
The following poems are by native Alaskan writer Priscilla Hensley.
Gentle being, how do you float across the ice to me?
You somehow know my heart's become overheated and that I churn, churn, churn, my own friction
burning me up.
I can only stand here on the edge again and look, wait, yearn, fog rises, strong being
you leap from pan to pan, something a child could do if we'd ever let one anymore.
Now you know I need your courage, you burst through the mist, over and over again I tried
to breathe you in.
In the morning there came a new bird's call, it seemed louder than all the others either
because it stood out or because the other birds were shocked into mere silence.
What's it saying?
Where's it from?
And perhaps more importantly are there others on the way?
So the texturing on this iceberg is generated from the translation of projected global temperature
rise data and set into a three-dimensional noise map.
It will be the water rising, not just against the measure of the shorelines and house posts
but as needed necessary things.
Fear fluttering in a parched mouth, the journey will be long, it will seem novel, risky, and
it may be.
The waveforms of a soundscape generated by running a Fairbank supercomputer data tape
through a reel-to-reel player have been used to form the layer of cirrus clouds above this
churning ocean.
And so much is gone, gone.
And now unknown fields chronicles this electric landscape, investigating the infrastructures
that serve as energy conduits, translating matter like a luminous language from a hole
in the ground to the glow of our phones.
And in this story we trace a wild journey of electrons from the radiant gizmos of our
technologies deep into landscapes far, far away.
And this fiction is an account of a new creation story of our energy, from the Big Bang to
the battery, from the birth of lithium at the beginning of the universe to the low power
warning flashing on our screens.
In the beginning, the beginning of the beginning, seconds from zero, 13.8 billion years ago,
the creation story of lithium began in a big bang.
It was there at the dawn of time alongside helium and hydrogen, just one of the only
three elements able to claim their ultimate origin in that hot, dense, primordial gas.
Like the only detectable ripple that's left of the Big Bang, it is the ghost of lithium
creation.
At five kilometres above sea level, on the Chajantore Plateau in the Chilean Atapama
Desert, the landscape has eyes.
Sixty-six white pupils turn in unison to search the thin air of these dark skies.
From here, the astrophysicists at Atapama's large millimetre array observatory are focused
skyward, travelling deep through the dark interstellar clouds of the coldest, oldest parts of the
universe.
At another community of nomadic shepherds, the indigenous Lakanti people used to own
this land and trekked across the grounds where the Adena now stand.
And on the Chajantore Plateau, all eyes have been on the shadows in the sky, silhouetted
against the light of the milky way the dark clouds that the Alma observe are the same
shadow constellations of indigenous mythology.
And dancing within a swathe of interstellar cloud that forged lithium is Yacana the Lama,
her baby and her shepherd.
And these creatures have trampled lithium, the lightest of metals, from the beginning
of time to the crust of the earth.
4.6 billion years ago, as Yacana drank from the sky, the wreckage of an exploding supernova
really began to condense into our planet.
In this vast cloud of swirling cosmic matter, gravity and violent collapse gave shape to
the sphere of the earth and embedded it within the traces of lithium.
Lithium comprises seven parts per million of the planet's crust, locked in the ground,
waiting for release, an electric film.
And 10,000 years ago, a series of lengths formed high on the Andean Plateau where Chile, Bolivia
and Argentina, the three countries of the lithium triangle now meet.
And here lies the largest salt lake on the planet, containing at least 50% of the world's lithium reserves.
And this salt lake was once a vast plain where incongiants lived, and among them was the beautiful
Tanupa, and she chose to marry Cusco, a strong young man, and had they had a son called Calcutin,
who was born of their union.
And while away on one of his trade journeys, he became infatuated with a pretty young woman,
and they ran off together, never to return.
And the gods, tired of these giant slides, secrecy and betrayal, decided to punish them
and pedrified all of them as mountains. And Tanupa began to cry, a volcano spewing ash
and rock from the depths of the planet, rich in light elements like magnesium, potassium,
boron, and of course lithium.
And while the tears rolled down her cheeks, her breasts began to lose the milk
that her son had not suckled.
And millennia of meltwater and the snow-capped peaks of her mountain
sneaked down through her rocky sides, leaching minerals into the lakes below.
And as the giants became volcanoes, Tanupa's tears ran into the subterranean brine,
and her breast milk crystallized as the crusty salt skin that now stretches endlessly across the plateau.
This charged landscape, this electric earth, remote, unforgiving,
is now quantified for its energy potential.
Cities, industries, and infrastructures will feed at the shores of this ancient lake,
playing out our electric future.
The future of green energy is made from the tears and milk of another mountain.
It was a little over 20 years ago that lithium erupted again in the Saladi.
A Belgian construction company found the ground too soft for construction,
but inadvertently it cracked open the earth to reveal the lithium-rich brine below.
A hundred million tons of iron was found in the ground,
but now Bolivia is ready, and the salar is soon to be industrialized.
This natural wonder has become the most lucrative of investments,
and has cast Bolivia as the top of the world.
And it's been a long, long time since Bolivia came into existence,
and it's been a long, long time since Bolivia came into existence.
It's a lucrative of investments, and has cast Bolivia as the Saudi Arabia of the electric age.
You cannot see on the desperately flat horizon, or access it by any public road,
it's a mystery that's protected by its isolation.
And lithium development is not mining through extraction, but mining through evaporation.
It's a tessellated ocean of evaporation ponds,
where each shift in hue signals a rising concentration of lithium salts.
And the shores of the metal sea begin at pond number 15, 0.2% of lithium, the least concentrated.
A zoo of blue with sodium chloride beaches.
And each month the ponds are drained and transferred to the next in line,
and each month the color changes, and the lithium gets richer.
And across 15 months the sea migrates through the holding ponds of the salar,
until it reaches the depth, coffee, waters of pond number 1, 5% lithium sulfate.
And what is left behind is massive quantities of table salt,
which is piled up beside the lithium ocean, and gradually a new mother mountain grows.
What will we call her, this crystal volcano?
A totem for a sacrificial seed evaporating to keep the streams glowing and the wheels turning.
This sea that has been slowly evolving across billions of years
is now ready to leave the land of giants forever.
Sucked up by a convoy of thirsty 18-wheelers,
and driven off the salar to the lithium carbonate factory to be processed into batteries.
The creation story of a battery becomes the creation story of a nation.
And as it gently vibrates across the earth,
the iPhone 6 can travel 14 hours on its 1810 milliamp lithium polymer battery
before it comes to rest.
It feels warm to the touch, and we're told stories about its lightness,
its slim lines, and reflected in its pristine polished glass
is the mirrored expanse of the crystal white salt lake from which it has been wrenched.
And nearly 9 billion mobile phones in the world are powered by lithium ion batteries,
and 5 to 10 grams of tunipers, tears, and her breast milk is contained in each one of our iPhones.
And in ludicrous mode, the 7000 lithium nickel cobalt aluminium oxide cells
of the 990 kilowatt battery pack that sits in the belly of this newly born Tesla P90D
delivers enough power to accelerate from 0 to 60 miles an hour in 2.8 seconds.
20 to 30 kilograms of lithium are at the core of each electric car.
And as this glistening beast shrieks down the tarmac,
it sends ripples across the turquoise pools of lithium brine.
It is a hunter stalking this electric future.
Three electrons orbit the lithium nucleus.
Our story began with the travels of stars and ends with these tiny revolving planets just waiting for a charge.
Unknown fields built a glass battery, a mythic love story that trickled charges of foam.
While the world does its best to ignore that technology is forged from the earth,
with marketing campaigns for ephemeral clouds and the relentless push for the smallest and lightest,
this object embodies the story of the landscape in which it was made.
A mass of alternating aluminium and graphite, anode and cathode,
submerged in a lithium brine electrolyte collected from Bolivia's Salada Uni.
This creates a slow reaction, the drip charge of a weeping volcano.
The creation myth of this landscape was told again and again as the electrons flow.
The flash of the Big Bang to the flash of an electron.
Our future is powered by the breast milk of volcanoes.
And in the same city a camera flashes and a model pouts.
And a whip of the hip catches the eye on the catwalk.
And fast fashions rolling tide dumps mountains of cheap clothing on the high street shores.
Objects of desire worn for one wild night and designed to be discarded.
So our second skin and identity statement, our comfort and costume,
our clothes reveal and camouflage they empower and imprison.
We're unraveled at CCCB, a project that's upstairs in the gallery.
We pick at a loose thread on the garment we're wearing and unravel it across continents.
From wardrobes to warehouse, from factories to field,
in search of the landscapes behind our runway dreams and high street blue jeans.
Before we wear them our clothes make journeys of tens of thousands of miles in their process of production.
Making textiles the most globalised industry on the planet.
T-shirts, cities and textile valleys span from field to factory
and harvest vast cotton crops and silkworm cocoons
and draw yarns across deafening shuttles of rows and rows of automated looms.
Weave the fashion fads of a distant world.
Here iconic rivers run with the colours of the seasons
as chemicals used in the dye process dump untreated to poison the land along their rainbow banks.
Unknown fields reveal the unseen effects of fast fashion supply chain
following it through the cotton fields, textile mills, die yards, garment factories
and shipping ports in India and Bangladesh.
The byproduct of this pace and scale of production
is the destruction of the very thing that brought the industry to Southeast Asia originally.
We meet the last generation of master weavers
a group whose skills now die with them.
The apprentices they would once train
now man the rumbling mechanised looms of global fashion.
Raw cotton plugging their ears
deaf to the din of the world around them.
And we visit the last real gold thread maker
an alchemist lovingly tweaking the machine his grandfather made
resisting the move to synthetic thread
cheap and fake yarns used by all the other companies around him.
And spanning from fashion victims to victims of fashion
unknown fields have developed a film and collaborative textile
that reveals the way traditional craftsmanship in the textile industry
is being put at risk by the disposable nature of fast fashion.
Working collaboratively with the last gold thread maker
and one of the last true master weavers in Baranasi
traditional craft expertise is drawn from
to create a narrative fabric artwork and film.
Audio from a series of interviews with these endangered craftsmen
and the sound of their looms is translated into a binary pattern
and woven into the cloth.
And the textile becomes an archive
encoded with the skills and stories of a dying craft
and woven with the same hands that it's trying to remember.
And to make the thread for the textile
unknown fields followed the container ships
that bring fast fashion to our shores
all the way to their death.
And after their short 25 year lifespan
they returned to India and Bangladesh to be broken up
and salvaged in the ship breaking yards.
And here we collected fragments of this raw steel
from the Bangladeshi shores
cut from the rusting carcasses of dead ships
to form the core of the gold thread.
It's a textile archive born from the skeletons
of the industry that brought it into being.
The cloth covers a young Indian textile worker
walking slowly on a procession
from our home in the village among the cotton fields
to the huge mills and factories
of the vast textile industry supply chain where she works.
Her journey suggests the walk along the fashion catwalk
that suggests the path our disposable fashion takes
in its global production.
And the path so many women like her have taken
and moving from villages to the factories in the city.
And as she walks she's gradually wrapped
in the glistening gold textile
bearing witness to a series of transformations
weaving, dying, sewing, and pressing.
And the film is set to the rhythms of the handloom
to fast fashion slow down to a pace of the production
of the planet that can be sustainable.
And her journey ends as she's completely cocooned
standing at the huge container port
among the megash container ships
that will export her to the west.
So for the project here at CCB for Unraveled
we've delved into the dressing up box
into the wild, whimsical, weird, and wicked world of fashion
to look deep beyond what is reflected
in the shimmering gilded mirror.
And behind the parties and the cash registers
the textile industry is gradually remaking our world.
And between the scale of the stitch
and the planetary supply chain
in glittering gold
we weave new connections
and reimagine the relationships between consumption
and production.
Thank you.
Thank you.
