Mark – followthethings.com

“A Global Positioning System“
A art work / animated film created by Melanie Jackson, first exhibited at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, UK.
Two screengrabs from the film are featured above. Watch it in full on the artist’s website here.

If you’re interested in finding out who makes your stuff, it’s important to make a strategic choice about what stuff is best to follow. Artist Melanie Jackson makes an excellent choice – what better to guide your way than the technology that helps to guide your way. An in-car GPS Navigation Assistant. The kind of device you could buy in the 2000s to stick to your dashboard. Type in the destination, and it would help you on your way, showing the route on screen. She gets some funding for a trip to China to visit a factory where they are assembled. But this isn’t anything like enough of the story of this thing. She looks into its in many many ingredients, and finds out where and by whom they are sourced. She reads news stories, collects photographs, and turn to drawing to bring all of these connections together into a 12 minute animated film. There’s something magical about animation. It’s obvious that animation is not an objective account of the life of a thing, but something that’s been imagined and made. Animation allows the complexities of trade to be conveyed in a way that would otherwise be impossible either because the scale of the task would be too enormous, or because permission would not be granted to access the industrial sites that matter. There’s a powerful argument that’s made about ‘follow the thing’ research that things can be – for these reasons – ‘unfollowable (see Hulme 2017). But animation – and other creative approaches to thing-following (click the ‘make the hidden visible’ tactic button) – provide means to work around this. This is a mind-blowing film. Its amazing what you can learn in 12 minutes!

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) A Global Positioning System. followthethings.com/a-global-positioning-system.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 20 minutes.

Posted on December 10, 2024January 7, 2025 by Mark

£20 Banknote

followthethings.com
Money & Finance

2009

BANK OF ENGLAND

£20 NOTE

SOURCED IN UZBEKISTAN?

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

“£20 Banknote“
Undergraduate coursework written by Oli Busk.

The students’ first task in the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the University of Exeter is to make a personal connection between their lives and the lives of others elsewhere in the world who made the things they buy. These are the people who help you to be you, followthethings.com CEO Ian tells them. So choose a commodity that matters to you, that’s an important part of your identity, that you couldn’t do without. Think about its component parts, its materials, and the properties they give to that commodity and your experience of ‘consuming it’. And write a 500 word first person account that connects your lives. One student – Oli Busk – has just got a £100 parking fine. He goes to the ATM to withdraw some cash, and then starts to think about what money is made from, its materials, its manufacture. Sure, there’s ways that it can be invested ethically and sustainability, but what about how its paper form is produced. The Royal Mint – which manufactures physical cash for the Bank of England – doesn’t say much about what it procures to make that cash. That would probably make it easier to make counterfeit money. So he indulges in some educated guesswork. There’s cotton in those notes, sooo … whose lives – apart from Queen Elizabeth – are in them? To his surprise, the hidden labour he finds is undertaken by students like him. And children.

Page reference: Oli Busk (2009) £20 Banknote. followthethings.com/£20-banknote.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.

Posted on August 21, 2024January 26, 2025 by Mark

The True Cost

followthethings.com
Fashion

“The True Cost“
A documentary film (with website) directed Andrew Morgan & executive produced by Livia Firth for Life Is My Movie Entertainment.
Available in full on YouTube (embedded above). Website here.

American filmmaker Andrew Morgan weeps in a New York Starbucks after seeing a front page newspaper story about the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh where over 1,100 garment workers were crushed to death making clothes for Western high street retailers and brands. It’s illustrated with a photos two young boys looking at photos the of missing, assumed dead, workers pinned up near the site. They are the same age as his sons and are looking for their missing mum. He is shocked to his core. How could something this atrocious be allowed to happen? He imagines making a film that will answer this question and sets up a kickstarter campaign to raise the money to finance it. He doesn’t believe that there’s an individual or organisation who, alone, could have saved those people’s lives by acting differently (like consumers, for example). So he travels to lots of places in fashion’s supply chains. He talks to workers, farmers, managers, retired executives, ethical fashion pioneers, NGO execs, journalists, doctors and academics. Viewers get to know some – like Shima Akhter the garment factory worker in Bangladesh and LaRhea Pepper the cotton farmer in the USA – better than others. He makes the argument that Rana Plaza was a systematic failure. This film’s networky trade justice activism shows how everyone in the industry could and should act differently to make things better. Some, as his film shows, are already doing so. But can it encourage more people to get involved in the systemic change that’s needed? Who needs to see it? Where? There’s a lot of detail to digest here! Maybe too much. This film generated more discussion than any example researched on our website so far.

Page reference: Olivia Dubec, Sophie Rees, Amelia Daniel, Becca Craig, Ellie Glynn, Frankie Ward & Katy Jackson (2020) The True Cost. followthethings.com/the-true-cost.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 146 minutes

Posted on August 21, 2024January 28, 2025 by Mark

The Eternal Embrace

followthethings.com
Fashion

“The Eternal Embrace“
A photograph by Taslima Akhter.
Photo blurred due to sensitive content. Available online.

Bangladeshi photographer and activist Taslima Akhter visits the ruins of the collapsed Rana Plaza factory. On April 24th 2013, over 1,100 garment workers were crushed to death there as they made clothes for high street brands including GAP, Primark and H&M. In the rubble, she spots two dead factory workers – a woman and a man – who appear to have died in each other’s arms. Her head is tipped back and a bloody tear has fallen from his eye. She takes a photo and posts it online. There are thousands of press photos of the disaster, but this one is said by many to be the most heart-wrenching and haunting. Commentators are repelled and drawn to its horror and beauty in equal measure. What were the final moments of these garment workers’ lives like? What was their relationship? What caused them to be killed like this? What impacts can a photo like this have on people who buy clothes made in factories like this? It’s profound.

Page reference: Nancy Scotford (2013) The Eternal Embrace. followthethings.com/the-eternal-embrace.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 47 minutes.

Posted on August 21, 2024January 5, 2025 by Mark

UDITA (ARISE)

followthethings.com
Fashion

“UDITA (ARISE)“
A documentary film directed by Hannan Majid & Richard York of the Rainbow Collective.
Available in full on YouTube (embedded above).

The women who work in garment factories in the Global South are often seen by factory bosses as docile and nimble fingered and by Global North journalists and activists as victims in need of saving from capitalist exploitation. But what if there was a film about their work, lives and struggles that was told from their perspectives? Watch UDITA (ASRISE)! Filmed in Dhaka, Bangladesh over five years – starting before and ending after the Rana Plaza factory collapse which killed so many women like them (including their friends and relatives) – Hannah Majid & Richard York show garment workers as an organised body of people teaching, learning and fighting for their labour rights through the campaigning and strike action of Bangladesh’s National Garment Workers’ Federation. There’s no Western filmmaker narrating their quest to find out who made their clothes. There’s no voiceover at all. The only voices are those of the women themselves. They are less interested in what ‘guilty’ consumers in the Global North can do to help them, and more interested in what they can do to help each other. So, who would want to see a film like this? Who was it made for? What are audiences supposed to take away from it? One answer is to appreciate how garment workers in the Global South have powerful collective agency. This is a fundamental, but often neglected, principle in trade justice activism. An important move for audiences to make, as the philosopher Iris Marion Young has put it, ‘from guilt to solidarity’.

Page reference: Theo Barker, Joe Collier, Annabel Baker, Lizzie Coppen & Henry Eve (2020) UDITA (ARISE). followthethings.com/udita.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 48 minutes.