If there is a single object that can be said to embody the disavowal implicit in the transnational bourgeoisie's fantasy of a world of wealth without workers, a world of uninhibited flows, it is this: the container, the very coffin of remote labor-power. And like the table in Marx's explanation of commodity fetishism, the coffin has learned to dance." -Allan Sekula 1September 2014. I've gathered with a small group of strangers outside a corroded, sea-green shipping container. We're told to remove our shoes and to place them in white shoeboxes, which we'll carry with us for the next forty-five minutes while traipsing barefoot in a series of shipping containers. There's water and sand to trek through, so this seems a sensible measure. But it resonates loosely in other ways too. Shipping containers and shoes: twin emblems of "globalization." The shoeboxes have the rough proportion of the containers, and we're the force propelling them on the journey ahead. (See figure 1.)When viewed from the outside, the six shipping containers that Shunt stacked on a defunct coaling jetty in South East London look as though they are waiting to be hoisted onto the bed of an idling lorry or the deck of a ship. But on entering the first container for the start of The Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face, this familiar icon of global trade is made utterly strange. Instead of cargo, the London-based performance collective has filled these forty-foot elongated boxes with thickly crafted environments that range from a jungle safari to something that resembles a terrifying dinner party. The structure of the performance as a tour through these discomfiting scenarios leaves audiences little chance to orient themselves to the bewildering worlds that Shunt fashioned inside its containers.
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