Plinth

Could you tell us about your collaboration with MTurk workers?

They were really amazing to work with. We gave them camera kits to shoot their own footage. It took a long time to shoot the work with each person, but then slowly, we built up better relationships and we all learned to shoot better images. Across the pandemic, more people started working from home and the project became even more relevant.

We also did a bunch of workshops before we started shooting. We met collectively on video calls. And we did a bunch of different sessions where I would sometimes pose questions and allow for everyone to just talk. Everyone just talked to each other about the issues with their jobs.

What you have to remember is that Amazon Mechanical Turk isolates people from each other. It was amazing for everyone to just connect about the different issues they were having on the site with their jobs. The workshops were a lot about discussing all the nuanced complexities of that. We went really deep into every aspect of what the work is about, what are the issues that they're all having with doing this work, or what are the things that they really appreciate about that work. I then brought in the archives of Fordlândia, and we discussed the similarities and differences.

How do you think this archival research informed Amazon?

The Fordlândia archive in Detroit was basically a lot of bureaucratic information about how Fordlândia was set up and run. It was all from the point of view of the managers. To learn about the conditions of the workers, you need to read between the lines. Archives are always from a point of view of power. You have to really look at it in a certain way to get a critical viewpoint.

For the work, I reinterpreted those events that I found in the archive, and the Amazon Mechanical Turk workers provided a way of asking, what's the point of view of workers now? What's the relationship of the past to the present?

The thread line is Fordism. Because it’s this seemingly ‘rational’ way of organising labour that Henry Ford wanted to bring to the Brazilian Amazon as a colonial act. And now we're in what you could say is a post-Fordist context where it's been spread across the world – the assembly line on steroids. Amazon Mechanical Turk is one example of how Fordism has just been disseminated to the extent that it's even come into the worker’s home.

It makes me think about how there's lots of ideas about freedom in contemporary employment. But actually, what we see really clearly in Amazon is that with digital working there's all these kinds of impositions of labour discipline: the managers can check your work rates very easily. Discipline gets aggressively reinforced by technology – the very thing that's supposed to be a symbol of freedom.

That's what I always find so curious. When you get into an Uber, for example, I always talk to the drivers. Many say they love the freedom of the work. I really think that's amazing. It's not about saying that flexibility shouldn't exist. But there's a dark side to all of that.

I think there's an embodiment of a Fordist way of working, as if now you don't necessarily need to be told by the manager to act a certain way. You might just do it because it's the only way you can get paid. And like you say, there's a panoptic-like discipline going on where you are probably being watched.

I was wondering about the decision to cast yourself as one of the managers in the film?

Yes, I have done that before, too. I made a piece with my sister in Houston, Texas called True Red Ruin (Elmina Castle), which looked at archives of the Elmina Castle in Ghana, built in the fifteenth century by the Portuguese. It was a really pivotal slave prison for the transatlantic slave trade, but it originally started as a storage site for gold. My piece explored that colonial history, thinking about what it would have been like to have this castle imposed in your community. I decided I would play the Portuguese colonialist, that I would become the villain. I wanted to acknowledge some aspects of the complex relationship that I have to the situation because there is always a power dynamic between the artist and their collaborators.

There was a particular part of Amazon which was more enigmatic to me, which is when you take the metallic box into a forest and bury it.

Basically, that’s a hard drive. And it has a drawing of a rubber seed on it. There was this British colonialist called Henry Wickham, who went to the same area where the Fordlândia rubber plantation was set up, but years before. He actually stole a bunch of seeds from there, and brought them back for Kew Gardens. These seeds became the basis of the British-Indonesian rubber industry. When Henry Ford wanted to compete in that industry, he thought the best rubber seeds were from there, and built the rubber plantation. It speaks to those unspeakable secrets of corporations and states as well, particularly how the history of science and technology is so enmeshed with imperialism.

I found the language of the imagery in Amazon really compelling. How much were you thinking about language, or even poetry?

I love that because I actually did start making work that was not more focused on language in a poetic way. For example, my early videos were made using methods of assemblage. I pulled texts from sources and then assembled it in a way to create a kind of poem.

As my work has developed that stuff comes through more in the imagery. With Amazon I tried not to be too specific with the scripting because of this slippage between it being a work with real people who have their own voice and then their characters with the narrative that we're trying to tell.

Some parts are actually assemblage in a way because it's like, if you say ‘Oh, I am working in the Amazon…’ the first part is what I told them to say, and then the second part is what they want to say. It's about their actual reality in their jobs. There was still an aspect of assemblage in the work, but I didn't try to be too precious about what was said. With the freedom of the workers’ inputs, the visual motifs became a way of structuring the film.

The set uses lots of plants and trees. What’s the importance of ecology in Amazon?

Before I made this work, I actually made a piece that was focused on an archive of Ford advertisements, most of which depict some form of landscape. I was really interested in this repetitive way of depicting landscape that puts the human in the centre of it.

In the safety of the car, you can consume this landscape – but this downplays how the ideology around the car disrupts real ecologies, a connection between all living things that is ignored. Importantly, it was ignored by Henry Ford with Fordlândia because they wanted to rationalise the environment in order to extract rubber. They burnt down the forests and planted all the rubber trees much closer together. This lack of diversity in the trees caused disease to spread between the rubber trees.

One of the reasons why Fordlândia never succeeded was because they did not listen to any indigenous knowledge of the forest. They only wanted to rationalise nature and turn it into an assembly line. That's why the props in the set are very artificial. It’s more about the representation of landscape, as opposed to being about the Amazon rainforest itself.

We are invited to see the world through the eyes of the capitalist.

Yeah, exactly.

At the end of the video installation the corporate figure says the workers are destroying ‘Amazon’. The images that we're presented with are quite different. The factory/plantation is burning down. One worker destroys his desk space and another worker is just blowing bubbles, so there are very different perspectives. What was the importance of the ending for you?

In the ending I chose to focus on the history of Fordlândia. From the archives I learned that there was this riot that happened in the plantation where the workers rebelled and destroyed loads of stuff. They really expressed emotions. It wasn't necessarily fully organised (although I'm pretty sure there probably was some organisation). It was an act of passion against what was occurring. It wasn’t technically the end of Fordlândia.

In Amazon, the Al (the narrator who plays the corporate voice and artificial intelligence) lists stuff that was actually destroyed. It’s this bureaucratic list accounting for everything lost. The imagery from the workers with Amy, Greg, Hunter and Elizabeth was really to do with rebelling against the film in a way. They're pulling down all the props and turning off the camera. It’s a simple way of showing refusal. Amy's character is blowing bubbles because that was what she wanted to do. Hunter decides to take a knife and destroys all of the banners. He was really into it and got really passionate and destroyed stuff. And I thought that was amazing. It was also to do with what everyone wanted to do. We decided that Amy would leave the house because in real life she doesn't really like working in the outside world. That's why she works at home for Amazon. At the end of the film, she takes a suitcase, and she leaves.

Amazon shows both those tendencies of resistance as organisation and then also resistance as rupture.

I think sometimes we forget that a lot of politics happens from feelings and collective forms of like: ‘Shit, I don't want to do this anymore!’ A collective moment occurs with energy and anger that are also at the root of political organising. I think that's so amazing.

The thing that's difficult about labour that occurs on sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk is that everyone's separated, and collective forms of emotion and organisation are much harder to gather. If you're in a factory, you can see people and be like, ‘fuck this shit.’ It does occur through online platforms. There are some organisations for AMT rights, such as the worker-led non-profit Turkopticon, who organise mutual aid and advocacy to improve conditions. It’s a little harder, but still possible.