Introduction to the exhibition, 8 December – 28th January 2007
Some Things You Are Not Allowed To Send Around the World 2003
A Global Positioning System 2006
Root Entry 2006
Melanie Jackson’s work draws on many different sources. She actively collects a wide variety of media outputs from around the globe: newsprint, video footage and other printed matter, which she then uses as a catalyst for the creation of films, animations, sculptures, posters, pamphlets and maps.
“I am interested in the sheer quantity of news from elsewhere that is available to us without leaving home, how much we have to filter, how we make sense of what comes into our lives through the TV and through newspapers”.
Her work explores the movement of people, ideas and goods around the world. She is interested in the way that this movement is highly restricted in some parts of the world and largely unrestricted in others. Some works are made in direct response to a story: others are fantasised imaginings or made from memory. She follows tales of peoples who have transformed the cultural or political landscape in different ways through very low key, domestic responses to international concerns.
Gallery 1:
Some Things You Are Not Allowed To Send Around the World 2003
Some Things You Are Not Allowed To Send Around the World 2003, is an installation of small-scale sculpture and video that has grown out of an ongoing interest in found stories and news media.
As a starting point Melanie Jackson collected as many International newspapers she could find in her local area of London. She wanted to see how far she could ‘go’ or travel in her imagination without actually leaving her immediate environment. Inspired by these
Foreign news stories – understood or imagined – the newspapers themselves became the raw material for the painstakingly constructed models seen here. The minutely detailed architectural models include cranes, water towers, satellite receivers, refugee camps and container ports amongst others. The slow and laborious process of making these models sits in stark contrast to the news media’s obsession with circulation and speed.
“I wanted to make something intricate and time consuming in defiance of their single day of currency”.
A series of spotlights guides us through these ‘communities’ giving us an aerial viewpoint of tiny imaginary landscapes. They are displayed in what appears to be an unfinished gallery space, alluding to the resourceful occupancy of appropriated spaces by people on the move. The compact beauty of this installation draws you in then forces dealings with the uncomfortable associations that Jackson presents.
Amongst this Lilliputian landscape are placed a number of video works, each telling a story that highlights temporary occupations – those of migrant workers. These workers are engaged with what Jackson calls ‘hidden work’. She says ‘production (and over production) are virulent, but labour is seen as something one ought to try and get someone else to do – even as an artist. And that’s a crucial aspect of the immigration issue…about displacing labour and effort.”
One of the videos A Westerly Wind and A Clear Night’s Sky, tracks an illicit journey by boat between Africa and the foothills of the Sierra Alhamilla in Spain. The Southern desert terrain is covered in a sea of geometrical, criss crossing waves and occasional scrubby bushes draped with thousands of scraps of torn plastic. These are the El Ejido greenhouses an estimated 64,000 hectares covered with sheet plastic and designed for the mass export of produce. Ironically this thriving industry that exports fruit and vegetables around the world thrives on the illegal settlement of a migrant labour force. Amidst this labyrinth of greenhouses live the workers in walls of dilapidated buildings, shells of old camper vans, or sheds alongside the pesticides and sacks of fertilizer. This underground economy generated tremendous wealth with produce from this province accounting for 80% of Spanish fruit and vegetable exports. The accompanying soundtrack is Moroccan ‘haragas’ music. Haragas translates as ‘blazers’ or ‘burners’ alluding to workers’ perilous crossings from North Africa in un-seaworthy boats and to the custom of burning or destroying their papers before they leave for Europe to avoid repatriation.
Melanie Jackson has also created a poster (from which the installation takes it’s name) made up of recent ‘prohibition and restriction guidelines issued by international post offices listing all the things you are not allowed to send to different countries around the world.
The list of items offer insights into the political, religious or socio-economic situations of individual countries and often reveal residual superstitions or other eccentricities; for example you can’t send spoons, forks or whistles to Croatia, blank invoices with headings to Israel, Rubber balloons to Kuwait, condensed milk to Somalia, musical greeting cards to Qatar or goods originating from Cuba, North Korea or Vietnam to the USA. The poster containing the complete list is available to pick up from the gallery.
The story continues in the centre of the gallery with a cluster of TV monitors that echo the groups of domestic workers from the Philippines gathered in Statue Square on a Sunday in Hong Kong. These women are conditionally contracted; the only work they are allowed to undertake is that of a domestic servant. Sunday is the only day they have away from their work. The women, numbering in thousands, congregate to to socialise, sing, eat and share stories. For one day a week, they take over one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the world in what seems like a public performance.
Another part of the story depicts one of the maids who, like many others in the overcrowded flats of Hong Kong, has no bedroom. Many maids sleep in bathrooms, under tables or the floor of children’s rooms. In the story, she sleeps in a kitchen cupboard; we see her going through the daily ritual of removing the crockery at dusk and replacing it at dawn. The tragic comedy of this animation gives us an insight into Jackson’s long standing interest in the newspaper cartoon with its ability to depict humour and adversity simultaneously.
Gallery 5:
A Global Positioning System 2006
Shown at the Arnolfini for the first time, the new animated work A Global Positioning System 2006 deconstructs a hand held GPS unit, attempting to trace each component back to its source. By animating the routes and methods of production, Jackson reveals an incredible journey from the rubber trees of Sri Lanka to the tin mines of the Congo, on to the production lines of China and finally to the palm of your hand. This voyage reveals reveals the complex web of locations, processes, materials and labour that go into the production of this hi-tech consumer product, uncovering the paradox of the expansive infrastructure needed to produce a device used to locate just one person in the world. For the creation of this work Melanie Jackson had the opportunity to travel to China and spend time in an electronics factory, seeing first hand how the GPS units are manufactured.
Reading Room:
Root Entry 2006
Whilst in China Melanie Jackson became more aware of what is known as ‘outsourcing’, where one country uses another to manufacture their products. What interested Jackson was that the majority of the products made in China are not cultural products: everything is made in China but not considered Chinese. She wanted to apply these ideas to the creation of an artwork primarily as an experiment.
For Root Entry 2006, Jackson made three drawings of a woman planting a seed. The images came froma page on a United Nations website detailing research carried out into the minimum amount of land required to sustain a human life.
She then made an open call on the Internet for companies across the world to take the drawings and animate them, in whichever way they chose, to complete the narrative, for a fee of two hundred pounds. She wanted to see how each country would treat the brief, to see whether they would politicise the drawings or not, and what she would get in return for her two hundred pounds.
The responses she received were mixed. Although Jackson’s original drawings were of a African black woman, four of the six responses transformed her into a European, white, blonde woman “it turned into something I didn’t expect, about desire, reproduction and about the woman’s fertility’.