To Be Inconvenienced

To Be Inconvenienced (working title)
2021, double-channel video installation, 24min 

Supported by Kunstlerhaus Buchsenhausen


To be Inconvenienced is a double-channel film that creates a fictional world based on the laws and phenomena that allow for the extra-national exception of maritime labour exploitation. It looks at the UNCLOS declaration that all vessels on the high seas must be considered national territory, focusing on how reflections and negations (of land - sea and state - non-state), create jurisdictional loopholes and paradoxes. It weaves together abstract vignettes and sequences, in which sea-based situations take place on land, and in its reflection.These terraqueously displaced situations, were written in collaboration with legal professionals and academics in the fields of maritime labour. This film asks what it is about the materiality of water/earth that denote ontologies of statehood or universalism, within an economy (where 95% of all goods travel by sea, hence through loopholes of labour-law) who’s unenforceability relies on these material distinctions as a scapegoat for this labour exploitation.