Fragment All to Nah: Patterns of Fragments

Abstract

This text begins on the Altonaer Balkon overlooking the river Elbe and the busy container terminals that have taken over Hamburg’s lower network of islands. The standardisation of shipping containers in maritime transportation in the 1960s, ‘made the world smaller’ and increased global interconnectedness across the orb. Watching the world come to your door remains mysterious; containers are small units that belong to a larger entity, cells within a great piece of machinery. They are also opaque. Amongst the enforcers, emblems, and symptoms of planetary globalization, containers are partly rational logistics, partly inscrutable pits. To secure one’s footing on this ‘terra mobile’ requires site-specific excavations. Beneath the curtain of measurable grids, turning on the light in pitch dark corridors reveals particular topographies, a ‘theatre of fragments’ in the puzzle of exponential connectivity. To reflect on this pattern of fragments, this text takes as a starting point a series of artistic research projects co-developed by TETI group in recent years. TETI (Textures and Experiences of Trans-Industriality) aims o bring artists and researchers from different disciplines together, to engage with the transformations of the present in the context of accelerated globalisation and to consider the modes through which diversification can be imprinted in the machinery of homogenisation. The discussion evokes in turn the figures of the lighthouse, chantiers, transportements, and arrière-cuisines.