Inquiry

By and large, our everyday goods and services appear before us with little trace of their origins or constituent parts—the geographically-distributed raw materials, resources, technologies, factories, or working conditions that bring them into being. If they did, the glitter and gleam of a new laptop, or the sweetness of an apple, might be tempered. How do we resist the intentional opacity of commodity chains? How do we foreground dangerous and underpaid work, gig work, precarity, and migrant labour, with the awareness that these labour practices underpin all of our commodities? We ask this knowing that visibility doesn’t inherently create change. The divergent practices seen here offer ethics and methods to resist opacity: nose-to-tail commodity chain tracking; mind-mapping corporate and state connections; building systems that visualize their own operation; performances that foreground their own place within the broader economy; discursive programs that link labour history with contemporary working conditions.