Crude Economy: TRADING PLACES
Programme 3: Trading Places
The hustle and bustle of an old marketplace in the heart of the city conveys a strong sense of materiality. Money is traded for tangible commodities: food, fabrics, household goods. Even the floor of the traditional stock exchange, with brokers waving and shouting, functions as a physical reference to the virtual trading of assets. Today this is mostly done by computers, buying and selling counted in nanoseconds. Labour is a commodity too; it has a price. Often this price is too low to even cover the costs of living. Through a mix of international experimental films, Trading Places addresses the social realities of modern urban economy.
Arrival, Mani Kaul (India 1980 | 19:00 min)
Men, women, fruits, flowers, vegetables, goats and sheep come to the city—all ready for consumption. In a collage of images held together by an engaging soundtrack, we are shown the brutality and dehumanization of city life.
Ilha Das Flores (Isle of flowers), Jorge Furtado (Brazil 1989 | 13:00 min)
Furtado’s acclaimed short film explores the economic relationship between humans, animals and food. It makes us laugh, but the laughter quickly dies, when following the path of a Brazilian tomato from the field to the Isle of Flowers, Porto Alegre’s landfill.
Unа Ciudad En Una Ciudad (A City Within A City), Cylixe (Germany 2012 | 18:00 min)
When the construction of a high-rise financial centre in Caracas, Venezuela, was abandoned 20 years ago, nobody dreamed that the building once would become a heterotopic space— the world’s tallest squat.
Unsupported Transit, Zachary Formwalt (Netherlands 2011 | 14:00 min)
Set on the construction site of the new stock exchange in Shenzhen, China, the video tells a story that begins with Muybridge’s early sequential photographs and moves on to Marx’s description of capital that appears to move of its own accord.
Paradise Later, Ascan Breuer (Austria 2010 | 13:00 min)
The camera follows a polluted river while we hear the annual report of a disillusioned Western businessman. The text derives from Josef Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, taken from late 19th century Belgian Congo to 21st century Indonesia.