Review: In the Wake Featuring Container
In the Wake, featuring the virtual reality film Container, was part of a series of site- specific performative interventions in the six port cities of South Africa organised by Dr Meghna Singh and Simon Wood during the first half of 2023. In the Wake engaged a specific moment in the history of each city which spoke to the general theme of Container: the import and export of people and things. I experienced Container for the first time in the impressive and well organised high-tech viewing booths set up on the shores of Clifton Beach during the In the Wake public intervention in January 2023. Clifton was also the site of inspiration behind Container. Singh’s desire to make the film was informed by the discovery of the slave ship São José Paquet e Africa, which sank with two hundred and twelve shackled slaves on board on 27 December 1794, just one hundred metres offshore from Clifton. Discovered in the 1980s, the wreckage had remained misidentified as a Dutch vessel until 2015. Through impressive collaborative archival work, the Slave Wreck Project (SWP) re-identified the ship as belonging to Antonio Perreira and captained by his brother, Manuel João Perreira, which had set sail from Lisbon for Mozambique on 27 April 1794. When the São José crashed during its return trip that December, it was carrying almost five hundred slaves destined for the sugar plantations of Brazil. More than two hundred slaves made it to the shore along with the ship crew, but they never made it to Brazil. Instead, the survivors were sold in the thriving market for slaves at Cape at the time.
Figure 1: Poster of the site-specific artwork In the Wake by Dr Megna Sign and
Simon Wood for the Cape Town iteration of the travelling performative intervention.
Courtesy of the artist.
In the “Making of Container” video, Singh recounts how the discovery of the new details of the shipwreck intensified her feelings of dissonance during visits to Clifton. The beach is home to obscenely wealthy, mostly white individuals who periodically descend from luxurious homes to share in “public” pleasures, like having a glass of wine whilst watching the incredibly beautiful sunset, along with other Capetonians. Inspired by the dystopic effect of the shipwreck, Singh, an artist who holds a PhD in visual anthropology, and Simon Wood, an award- winning filmmaker, began the project Container in 2017. Since then, the film has been well received at various prestigious film festivals in Venice, London and New York. Container explores the invisibility of people and things by connecting the hidden story of the shipwreck to the thousands of shipping containers and their invisible cargo which enter and leave Cape Town’s busy present-day ports. In the video, Singh invites the audience to “contemplate the hidden processes of globalisation and their connection to the movement of capital” through which “people have become commodities… the very definition of slavery.” By juxtaposing the historical and the contemporary, the project attempts to connect slavery and contemporary neoliberalism through a visual exploration of themes of globalisation, mobility and commodity fetishism. The creators’ intention is to “make visible the invisible bodies of consumer society” and to reveal the “hidden truths that the city hides.”
Such a conceptual project easily lends itself to the creators’ selection of 180-degree virtual reality three-dimensional technology to create an immersive experience that straddles the genres of documentary and constructed reality. The influence of the creators’ five inspirations behind the visual, sensory, editorial and technological choices are palpable in the film, shaping the viewers’ interaction with its conceptual content. Through such aesthetic choices, Container creates a visceral, nonlinear and liminal reality that achieves its desired aim to ‘break the fourth wall’ and bring the viewer and subject into uncomfortable proximity. Unlike other immersive experiences, Container is intentionally non-interactive. Its creators bar the audience from participation by forcing the privileged viewer to powerlessly and passively witness the invisible lives of “black bodies trapped in an endless historical cycle of servitude,” as described by the directors. Through the non-interactive immersive experience, the creators wish to draw such viewers’ attention to their own complicities in exploitation and its invisibilisation. Perhaps this is why the creators provide us an insight into Container as itself a site of production in their “making of” video. The latter makes visible the mammoth labour, planning, direction, set building, arranging, transplanting and acting which transforms actual shipping containers into the artworks which imitate life (which, in turn, imitate art) in the absurd theatricality of the everyday life of capitalist production.
Figure 2: Photograph of the site-specific performative artwork at Clifton Beach 2nd.
Courtesy of the artist and the Institute of Creative Arts at the University of Cape
Town/Xolani Tulumani.
The actual film, Container, begins and ends at Clifton beach. Its opening scene places the viewer inside the ocean water and in front of a floating shipping container. The next scene transports the viewer inside. An African slave breathes heavily as water fills up the container. The African male eventually pushes the doors open and finds himself in a sugar cane field. We are returned to Clifton in the final scene, where history meets the present. In the scene, historical slaves pull on barnacled chains that slowly convey a large heavy chest from the ocean to the shore whilst bewildered contemporary white beach goers look on. In between the Clifton beaches the film moves between multiple scenes that unfold within meticulously designed, thoughtfully elaborated, precisely curated “containers” of capital. Each container is an impressive, immersive artwork that bears testament to the labour that produced it. In each container. method actors perform scenes of everyday life that collectively unveil the obscene undersides of imperialism and neoliberal modernity. Two scenes in the film stand out, highlighting the gendered order of late capitalist exploitation; some of the scenes and trailer can be viewed here.
In the first container, mounds of material, soccer balls, sneakers and clothing provide the messy, dimly - lit landscape in which South Asian women and children sit in various positions, their little hands sewing diverse products. It closely resembles infamous real-life scenes from cramped, sealed-off, locked-in factory warehouses in particular parts of the world. While we never see the outside, the film intimates the journey such products will make across the world, finding their way to organised shelves in name- brand stores and brightly lit shopping malls. In the second container, pink neon lights dimly illuminate a different tense and uncomfortable scene. A young pretty East Asian woman prepares the massage table for a hairy - chested, pot-bellied, translucent Britisher. He is a customer in a nondescript but seemingly ‘Thai’ massage parlour. Each time we are returned to this scene, we bear witness to how he slowly implores her to ‘ move down’ whilst she appears meek, vacant and forlorn. We never see ‘the ending,’ but it is implied. The scenes effectively illustrate how capital is able to mediate our most intimate experiences from motherhood, work, sex and play, blurring the distinctions between them in ways that are extractive and hyper - performative rather than ‘freeing’ and autonomous. Like these scenes, each container in the film functions at once as a local, internal and cut-off reality and representative of a global, external, interconnected capital.
Figure 3: Performers of the site-specific performative artwork at Clifton Beach 2nd.
Courtesy of the artist and the Institute of Creative Arts at the University of Cape
Town/Xolani Tulumani.
Containers’ non-participatory, non-linear and cyclically juxtaposed scenes successfully make visible the links between such scenes of extraction. Such packaging allows the film to acquire a Gonzo-esque feeling and reminiscence with critiques of globalisation and neoliberalism emerging from the late 1980s. Like Manuel Castells’s work on informal economies, David Harvey’s “Right to the City,” Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums and the emergence of the World Social Forum, Container reminds us of the creation of new frontiers of wealth and poverty under late capitalism. Such critiques drew our attention to the contradictory forces of capital that, at once, fragment labour processes and traditional worker collectives and connect us together on an unprecedented global scale through such exploitative and extractive labour practices. Like such critiques, Container shows how capital can link together the licit and illicit in the production and transit of goods through porous, blurred and permeable borders. At the same time, whilst such critiques stimulated an idea of a unified global anti-capitalist movement, they proved increasingly insufficient in countering the fragmenting impulse of late capital. This was, in large part, because such attempts to highlight and challenge what was assumed to be new processes and modalities of capital paid little attention to their historical antecedents in imperial and colonial modes of rule. Despite its many achievements, Container raises several issues long associated with this genre of critique of capital in the postcolonial world. These issues emerge from the relationship between discourses on objecthood, mobility and commodity fetishism and their relationship to history, which the film attempts to engage. Whilst Container attempts to link historical slavery to modern iterations of economic servitude, colonialism, and violence remain only subtly suggested in the film. This gap influences how the audience of Container is able to engage its attempt to reveal invisiblised forms of contemporary exploitation.
The idea of people as property and objects has a long history in slavery and post-slavery society. In Aimé Césaire’s famous equation, “colonisation = thingification.” His formulation sought to reveal how the process of colonialism attempted to reduce people to things in the name of an enlightened, civilised and modern Europe. For Césaire, colonialism relied on the erasure of the history of colonised peoples: “ Cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.” [1] This process attempted to reduce colonised peoples to hollow and malleable figures who could serve certain economic ‘functions’ in the new racial hierarchy that marked the advent of Euro-modern imperialism. But, as CLR James pointed out, this process of dehumanisation never quite succeeds. In the opening pages of his seminal text, The Black Jacobins, James wrote of captured African slaves forced to work on white colonial plantations:
The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins, quite invincibly human beings, with the intelligence and resentments of human beings. [2]
The idea of people as things risks losing sight of such an irreverent human subjectivity, since it is precisely humans’ refusal to behave like property and objects throughout history that made various forms of resistance to domination possible. Rather than objecthood, as the James quote suggests, we are confronted instead by the stubbornness of black historical subjects, who refuse to submit to the dehumanising impulses of imperial and colonial violence. In the history of slavery and colonialism, violence is a major term that marks black experience and, without an engagement with such history, the connection between slavery and neoliberalism cannot be made visible.
It is also this history of violence that makes it difficult to extend a ‘shared’ nature or ‘mobility’ between people and things. This is because forced migration is not interchangeable with mobility. Whilst the latter implies a notion of freedom, the former is characterised by freedoms’ constraint. In a global neoliberal order, as Jorge Drexler’s song “Disneylandia” so acutely portrays, capital and objects increasingly know no borders, but people are constantly confronted by them. In the double play of neoliberalism, things can move, but people increasingly face death everyday just for trying. Without engaging the historical constitution of racial hierarchies and practices of anti-black racism, contemporary cycles of exploitation can appear ahistorical and therefore ‘endless.’ And whilst Container, perhaps rightly, invites us to accept our shared complicity and participation in global capitalism, the enormous power differentials in such ‘complicity ’ are left unexplored, making it less possible to point to anyone or anything behind them. Rather than black objecthood, it may be worth considering how capital is able to conscript us into its racialised modes of subjectification . Since, in narratives where all are equally complicit, none are responsible; in representations where violence is minimised, victimhood becomes maximal. In other words, that ‘liminal’ space in the film is occupied by tranquil and artistic scenes of exploitation may save black bodies from white violence on screen, but it limits the possibilities for black rage, joy or freedom and leaves perpetrators of oppression, domination and violence unnamed, unmasked, absent, opaque or, at best, compromised.
This minimisation of violence was most visibilised at the Clifton site of the In the Wake intervention in Cape Town. In quite a trippy experience, at Clifton, one walked in from the scene where Container begins and walked out into the scene in which it ends, and the public intervention unfolded. The live art installation was a staging of a seventeenth century ship wreck scene as elaborately constituted as the containers of the film. It was a decidedly placid and calm scene that depicted a journey gone awry. Method actors in Victorian dress sat amidst rope, nets, big wooden chests, bits of fruit, wood, masts and bottles, looking anxious, distraught, forlorn, listless, hot and thirsty as they walked and sat around helplessly in the blazing afternoon sun. Unfolding amid bikini clad bodies and shirtless volley-ball players frolicking in a glorious Cape Town summer Sunday, the massive, shipwrecked scene could not have been more visible or incongruous. Yet, although the mere sight of the wreck may have signified violence for black South Africans, the explicit non - violence of the scene produced particular paradigms of engagement.
When I arrived at Clifton on the busy Sunday afternoon, I put my name on the Container viewing list and, when I emerged from the experience, others seemed to arrive for the same reason. There were many familiar faces, academics, filmmakers, artists and other like-minded folk who came to watch the film and reflect on the installation. Young, eager production assistants approached the public to entice them into seeing Container. Some chose to watch. O thers took pictures of the wreck and its actors. Others still were simply unwilling or unable to sacrifice the few- odd minutes and potentially ruin what was otherwise a perfect beach day. Viewing the installation and the public’s engagement with it as one performance, I thought about the stark difference in reception between this public intervention and one which unfolded at Camps Bay when young black South Africans slaughtered a sheep on the beach in a ‘cleansing ceremony’ in late December 2018. Chumani Maxwele explained to the media at the time, that the ceremony called on the ancestors to respond to collective black “trauma at the hands of white people over the years.” It was sparked by the early closure of the public beach by a private security company at Camps Bay which shares in common with Clifton its character as a beachside suburb that is home to incredibly wealthy (and largely white) residents. Those involved in the slaughter argued that the early closure was racially exclusive, since a large majority of black working class people paid to travel long distances to enjoy the beach during the few days of holidays they were afforded in the year. When confronted by the unsanctioned and bloody attempt to unmask the racialised social dynamics of the city, privileged white Capetonians at Camps Bay literally became involved in brawls and shouting matches with the mostly young black protestors. As social media filled up with videos, news platforms reported events as “clashes” between residents and protestors. Tensions ran high and police were soon called in. That it had lingering effects is evidenced by a mocking election video for the ‘Cape Party’ which referenced the events by staging a ‘watermelon slaughter’ on the beach a year later.
Figure 4: Amalgamated photographs of the site-specific performative artwork at
Clifton Beach 2nd. Courtesy of the artist and the Institute of Creative Arts at the University
of Cape Town/Xolani Tulumani.
But at the In the Wake intervention at Clifton in 2023, when presented with the serene, well- organised, well-resourced, high - tech, legal and bloodless public intervention, outrage, condemnation and disgust was simply not possible. Nor was the image of the ‘other’ available for appropriation, ridicule or dismissal, as had been the case at Camps Bay. Rather, when faced with the installation, which brought some peacefully into contact with parts of their ancestral history at Clifton, a particular range of engagements became possible: people were varyingly amused, intrigued, quiet, steadfastly indifferent . The scene of shipwreck came to reflect what Gabeba Baderoon called the “ambiguous visibility” [3] of slavery in calm and picturesque landscape images of colonial art devoid of violence at the Cape. The wreck’s reception seemed to reflect the palpable reality of public life in these parts of Cape Town. Rather than the invisibility of black servitude, the everyday in the City of Cape Town is structured in a way in which everything is visible, seen and laid bare, but nothing is acknowledged. Things are, for better or worse, exactly as they appear. From homelessness, to endless lines of black domestic workers, gardeners, petrol and shop attendants, store attendants, nannies, salon workers and receptionists standing in a parking lot overlooking the magnificent ocean view waiting for taxis to take them back to dusty black townships at the end of the workday, to middle class black people eating in white owned, white patronis ed restaurants, all are passed over as if they are there and it does not really require a discussion. They are only to be tolerated, extracted, ignored or discarded. Container’s attempt to connect slavery to neoliberalism, therefore, relies so precisely on a historical linkage that is necessarily invisiblised. Perhaps this is part of capital’s triumph in the postcolonial world and the settler colony in particular. Such an unequal social configuration requires that the privileged must think and produce the past as ‘history’ by conveniently skipping over the uncomfortable facts, in order to enjoy the present. Whilst it is not the burden of art to change the world, Container and the Clifton intervention were worth seeing as important reminders of that which remains shrugged off in a society such as this. An impressive artistic and visual experience, the combined performance achieves its aim to reveal its contained undersides without allowing us to look away.
Endnotes
[1] Aimé Césaire, “Discourse on Colonialism” [Trans. Joan Pinkham]. Monthly Review Press, (New York and London, 1972),
6. Originally published as Discours sur le colonialisme by Editions Presence Africaine, 1955.]
[2] CLR James, The Black Jacobins: Toussant L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, (London: Allison and Busby
Limited, [1936] 1980), 11.
[3] Gabeba Baderoon, Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-apartheid, (Johannesburg: Wits University
Press, 2001), 45.
