Theatre from the Jungle (2018)
Theatre from The Jungle addresses the unique landscape of immigration and labour in Brandon, Manitoba through a re-evaluation of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel entitled "The Jungle". To develop the project, the artists worked with a group of twelve individuals consisting of immigrants who are current or ex-employees of the largest hog processing plant in Canada.
The first part of the project presents individuals and groups performing movements common to a hog processing plant, such as ushering in pigs, removing heads, slicing guts, chopping ribs, counting chops, packing boxes, etc. The piece gives a glimpse into the organization of the production line, but more explicitly portrays the patterns of bodily movements at work in the meat packing industry. By subtracting the factory, meat, tools, noise, and protective gear that employees normally wear, the piece calls attention to the singularity of the individual - not as a worker but as a person - as well as to the interaction between colleagues. It also gives visibility to the particular form that a body and mind adopt in a highly repetitive production process designed for standardisation and efficiency.
The second part of the project presents an installation of multiple videos, each featuring one participant’s description of their experiences immigrating to Canada and working in the meat packing industry. The participants reflect on the motivations and circumstances which led them to migrate, and their imagination of what their future in Canada might be like. Most of the interviews were recorded in the participants’ homes. Taken together, this collection of testimonies reveals broader trends about how labour and migration are connected to broader social, cultural, political and economic realities. It also offers a glimpse into how the international mobility of workers is shaped by both local and global forces, and how individuals from different geographical and migratory circumstances think of, and come to live in, a single city in Manitoba.
The third part of the project presents a reading group consisting of current and ex-employees from the meat packing plant in Brandon. The group reads from a selection of rewritten passages from Upton Sinclair’s work of fiction entitled “The Jungle,” a novel which depicts the harrowing experiences of a group of immigrant labourers working in the stockyards in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century.
With the participation of: Weldemariam Bahta, Mekides Belete, William Lopez Beltran, Tesfagergis Geberezgabier, Miao Yan Huang, Robel Kibrom, Jianwen Kuang, Belaynesh Mekonnen, Juan Mendez, Eduardo Rogriguez, Chen Xuhong, and Yanfang Yang.
Theatre from the Jungle, 2018, installation consisting of three works, Meat Packing: single-channel video, 33 minutes; Interviews: an installation including eight single-channel videos: chairs, plinths and headphones; Reading The Jungle: single-channel video installation, 41 minutes: monitor, scripts, table, chairs and wall panel.
