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- Convenors:
-
Karin Krifors
(REMESO Ethnic and Migration Studies)
Benjamin Gerdes (Institute for Futures Studies)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
Departing from anthropological insights on circulation, as well as analyses of struggles over logistics sites, infrastructures, and labour, this panel examines the importance of aesthetics, co-creation and participatory methods to propose new futures for and beyond logistics.
Long Abstract
Anthropology has examined circulation through sites of logistics, but also as a theoretical key-concept and as methodological strategy, and has, over the past decade, captured complex responses to a ‘logistics revolution’, characterised by ‘Just-in-time’- manufacturing, containerization, automatization, new information technologies and platform models. The field has highlighted how apparently seamless flows and circulation of goods, as well as smart technological and spatial calculations, are often paired with casualisation of labour, environmental disruption and platformisation of economic and social influence.
In/visibility constitutes a particularly important theme in anthropological studies of shipping, roads, gig work or algorithms, suggesting collaborative and emerging research methods attentive to how logistics, labour, and infrastructure are seen, sensed, and represented. In this panel we discuss the possibility that aesthetics is not peripheral, but fundamental, to shaping public imaginaries, legal negotiations, and local responses to the rapid reorganisation of land, sea, information, labour and communities. This panel encourages the expansion of these discussions towards elaborations and illustrations of how participatory and co-creative practices bridge oppositions between, for instance, the blockade and the violence of circulation, or dis-engagement and institutional conflict. We invite contributions that span across ethnographic and participatory co-creative methods (including counter-mapping, visual art, documentary, fiction/poetry and performative practices), and to understand the specific aesthetics of logistics, but also to engage in questions of collectivity, reciprocity, participation and co-production in countering aesthetics.
We further invite responses to a panel that will investigate:
How are logistics labour or infrastructures narrated, as popular and cultural practices, and what are the interventions that researchers and artists can contribute to challenge taken-for-granted and polarised speculations about new futures in, for, and beyond logistics?
How can we understand the spatial and aesthetic components of logistics and how can mapping, collective viewings and non-extractivist forms of research and art be developed?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Based on ethnographic research at Dordoi, a vast container built bazaar in Bishkek, this paper examines the dual character of the container. It argues that the world’s most successful logistical form endures through standardized rationality as well as flexible appropriation and pragmatic deviation.
Paper long abstract
This presentation examines the shipping container as a defining form of contemporary logistics, understood as an aesthetic object, a material structure, and an ideological device. The analysis draws on ten months of ethnographic research at Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, one of the world’s largest wholesale markets built almost entirely from shipping containers and a major hub linking trade routes between China, Turkey, Central Asia, and Russia. At Dordoi, the container occupies an ambivalent position. It materializes the rationalizing ambitions of logistical capitalism, shaped by standardization and mobility, yet once anchored in place it becomes deeply entangled with everyday economic and social life. Focusing on traders’ tactile, affective, and spatial engagements with containers, I show how the container logics is adapted and reworked through daily use. Attending to these sensory and material relations foregrounds logistics as something lived and felt rather than merely technical or abstract. The paper situates these observations within anthropological debates on infrastructure and global political economy, while contributing to discussions of visibility and concealment in logistical systems. I argue that the container’s persistence as a governing form of circulation lies in its capacity to accommodate what I term minimal misrule: pragmatic, small scale appropriations that bend standardized systems without directly contesting them. These practices complicate dominant imaginaries of seamless circulation by revealing how logistical infrastructures are continually reshaped through embodied labor and local knowledge. Ultimately, containers offer a way to trace how local and global relations are co-constituted through the concrete forms of their unfolding.
Paper short abstract
Based on museum ethnography in the Netherlands, this paper shows how Chinese porcelain is reordered through curatorial aesthetics that cool colonial conflict, positioning museums as infrastructures where aesthetics governs asymmetrical circulation.
Paper long abstract
The circulation of Chinese porcelain in the West was initiated in the 16th century during the era of maritime expansion. Scholars have largely viewed this circulation as a process of movement without accounting for the intricate institutional and aesthetic practices that govern the circulation of objects. Drawing from ethnographic research at museums in the Netherlands, this re-conceptualizes Chinese porcelain, whose circulation in the West is thus dependent on aesthetic and institutional practices as forms of governance.
Spanning from methods of exhibition to the curatorial display of Chinese porcelain, this study demonstrates how porcelain is incorporated within the curatorial aesthetic envisioned through taxonomies of style and refinement. Although these practices invoke a contemporary stasis of porcelain within the museum, the logistical and colonial relations that initially enabled the circulation of Chinese porcelain, particularly through the Dutch East India Company (VOC), are reorganized. Instead of contesting with the violence underlying its initial circulation, museums displace these dynamics of conflict through what I refer to as institutional cooling.
That is, the museum orders colonial asymmetries as aesthetic and taxonomic relations, thereby subjecting the object to a process of institutional cooling. This positions museums as infrastructures of circulation in which aesthetics is a technology of governance for the relational asymmetries that occur through the movement of objects. By foregrounding institutional cooling as a mode of circulation, this anthropological approach contributes to discussions on aesthetics, logistics, and relations of conflict and violence within our polarizing world.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on counter-mapping and sensory-material analysis of palm oil's circulation and processing, I show how logistics abstracts palm oil materially and infrastructurally, making it a “negative witness” to dispossession, exploitation, and environmental harm.
Paper long abstract
Tank farms and shipping ports are routinely targeted by activists as nodal sites for the circulation of palm oil, one of the most environmentally harmful commodities. Yet these logistical spaces show only fragments of the plantation economies they sustain, as the violence of agro-extraction gets concealed within anonymous architectures that render both production and circulation opaque.
This contribution examines palm oil circulation as an aesthetic and material regime of invisibility, where logistics does not merely move commodities but actively abstracts them. It follows palm oil as a sensory medium that reveals the (not-so-)hidden entanglements between matter and infrastructures. Drawing on a counter-mapping project tracing the supply chain ‘from plate to palm’, I show how data illegibility and the fragmentation of the chain are deliberately produced to conceal political and environmental violence, and to allow extractive economies to function seamlessly. Such an invisibility is also materially inscribed in the oil. Across crushing machines, pipelines, and processing tanks, industrial processes transform palm oil’s material properties, stripping it of colour, smell and variability, and stabilising it as a transparent and adaptable substance. In the process, palm oil becomes a “negative witness” to broader dynamics of colonial dispossession, labour exploitation, and environmental transformation. As such, I argue that invisibility does not concentrate in a logistical site — but it operates as a condition sustained across sites. By approaching logistics through counter-mapping and sensory analysis, this contribution advances anthropological debates on the aesthetics of logistics, showing how abstraction and invisibility are materially and infrastructurally produced.
Paper short abstract
We examine how aesthetic and spatial features of the warehouse are woven into the everyday meaning‑making of work‑based socialities and resistance. We draw on collaborative mapping exercises with unions and workers to develop theories about the political and spatial situatedness of the warehouse.
Paper long abstract
The warehouse is central to contemporary logistified capitalism. Unions worldwide have long focused on its labour conditions, its pervasive surveillance and the rise of automation specifically developed in fulfillment centers. A place where workers are shuffled in and out for shifts, a streamlined box architecture for in-between places or in vast parks that host many other similar structures, the warehouse is a mostly ignored yet ever-present element of economic transformation. How, though, are the warehouse’s aesthetic and spatial features woven into the everyday meaning‑making of work‑based socialities, solidarities and resistance?
This presentation draws on collective, comparative research into the making of European logistics towns in post‑industrial settings. Through fieldwork in Eskilstuna, Sweden, and Dos Hermanas, Spain, we have engaged with municipal authorities, logistics firms, workers and unions to trace how logistics hit the ground locally. We argue for an ethnography that approaches the warehouse from the outside: documenting how it is commercially imagined, politically emplaced and classed in embodied practice.
Concretely, we reflect on collaborative mapping exercises conducted with union representatives and Amazon workers in Spain. These creative cartographies make visible the spatial technologies of surveillance and algorithmic control, the choreography of labour, and the shadow geographies where organising and refusal take shape. By attending to mapping as a method and a practice, we show how strategies of resistance are spatially produced and embedded in the material arrangements of the warehouse.
Paper short abstract
This paper provides a case study for artistic research to offer a counter-aesthetic of contemporary “logistics landscapes,” linking digital technologies and (largely invisible) human labour and ecological demands across spatial and social separations via participatory audiovisual fieldwork.
Paper long abstract
This paper provides a case study for artistic research to offer a counter-aesthetic of contemporary “logistics landscapes,” linking the visible digital technologies and (largely invisible) human labour and ecological demands across spatial and social separations via participatory methods and visual ethnographic fieldwork. The project “Ghost Platform: Generating the “Complex Image” of Data, Labour, and Logistics” (2022-2025) utilized unique audiovisual perspectives to formulate new aesthetic, legal and theoretical tools. Employing methods of co-creation and self-representation, logistics workers and organizers used digital technologies to document the violence enacted by digitalised logistics systems, while sharing examples of how to resist and subvert these very mechanisms. The result is a co-produced aesthetic counterpoint to industrial visions of smooth and smart circulation via the witnessed systemic contradictions and exploitation of logistics and platform workers.
Situated in or past the periphery of the urban landscape, transport and logistics sectors are also emblematic of how digital technologies become utilised through algorithmic management and platformisation to co-produce a peri-urban socio-ecological wasteland. The warehouse sitting next the data centre becomes a symbol of hidden-in-plain sight urban-excess; two seemingly impenetrable black boxes that hide the role these structures play in facilitating a socially differentiated urban economy. In these landscape makeovers non-adjacent flattened land becomes the primary site of urban speculation and its corollaries: collapse, bust, and wasteful abandonment.