Sealanes

With François Lemieux

Installation and video

Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery (Montreal)

Counter to the cosmopolitan imaginary of getaway travel, what does it feel like to be attached to the slowness and friction of the waves, to rub shoulders, without mingling, with the Filipino workers amid the thousands of containers carrying the rewards of our hourly-rate living? What does it feel like to smell the oil and feel the rumbling walls, the tireless seesawing of the horizon and the vertigo of waiting for solid ground 20 metres above the water and four kilometres above the ocean floor?

Crossing the Atlantic in the hold of cargo’s distended time. An experience of oneself as merchandise—a precarious worker in a presence economy that requires you to be everywhere, and hence nowhere, at once. Uprooting oneself to make superficial contact with other uprooted people, to build momentum and advance, maybe get even further next time around.