Xmas Unwrapped

Unknown Fields and Toby Smith unwrap Christmas [by] following the decoration supply chain (Source: Garry 2015, np link).

… [in] a short, enlightening video (Source: Timmons & Timmons 2022, np link).

This wryly festive short … takes us on a brief tour of what are known as ‘just-in-time’ factories in [Yiwu] in China, facilities that produce seasonally themed commodities for consumption in the West. Set to a children’s choir belting out an insistently cheerful Cantonese rendition of ‘Jingle Bells … (Source: Anon 2019, np link).

… sung by the Chinese Kids Choir … (Source: Mufson 2014, np link).

… Xmas Unwrapped shows one stop on the supply chain of items such as candied apples, Christmas hats and other assorted seasonal trinkets with limited shelf lives … (Source: Anon 2019, np link).

… [and]contrasts sharply with the dingy factory floors that are decidedly not part of Santa’s factory (Source: Mufson 2014, np link).

You can see it on the screen: the Christmas factory, which in children’s books is a romantic place where elves in green pointed hats swing from point A to point B. The ‘real’ factory is located in the Chinese city of Yiwu. Instead of elves and snow, you see factory workers spraying boots red and quartering fir branches in seconds (Source: Van den Berg 2021, np).

Released as part of the larger World Adrift documentary … Xmas Unwrapped is a ‘satirical Xmas card’ that … explores … less-than-festive factories … [and] showcases behind-the-scenes footage of workers repetitively sewing, gluing, and packaging Santa hats, plastic Christmas trees, and shiny ornaments (Source: Mufson 2024, np link).

[Karianne Fogelberg:] What was the motivation for these expeditions? [Liam Young:] … We were interested in telling alternative stories about the contemporary city, and we wanted to unravel the stories that are fundamental in the shaping and framing of the modern city but don’t actually occur within the site plan of the city itself. Much of architecture focuses on the city as a discrete object and entity to be designed. What’s on the site plan is part of the thinking of the project, and what falls off its edges vanishes. But the modern city no longer occurs on a single site. All the contingent landscapes scattered around the world are fundamental in the making and shaping of that city: the mine site where that city begins its life; the trash heap where it ends its life; the various landscapes involved in feeding the city. None of these places look urban, but they are actually either produced by the city or themselves produce the city. Unknown Fields explores the idea that landscape design has collapsed into architectural design, product design, planetary design, and that thinking on any one of those scales involves an understanding of the interconnected systems and networks or global supply chains through which those scales exist (Source: Fogelberg 2024, np link).

[For us,] distant landscapes – the iconic and the ignored, the excavated, irradiated and the pristine – are embedded in global systems that connect them in surprising and complicated ways to our everyday lives (Source: Smith 2014, np link).

These [systems] are the contours of our distributed city, stretched around the earth from the hole in the ground to the high street shelf (Source: Smith 2014, np link).

[They] form a vast network of elusive tendrils, twisting threadlike over everything around us, criss-crossing the planet, connecting the mundane to the extraordinary (Source: Davies & Young 2022, p.165).

What we’re trying to do is talk about this extraordinary, planetary-scale infrastructural system that we’ve put in place that most of the world doesn’t know exists … The scale and production of infrastructure required to deliver the world that we know is utterly extraordinary, but it’s so big and so ubiquitous that it’s kind of become invisible … This project is trying to reveal the systems behind modern living (Source: Young in Campbell-Dollaghan 2014, np link).

Our material things set in motion [this] vast, planetary-scale infrastructure. They carve holes like canyons, they move mountains, they remake our world from the scale of the pixel to the scale of the planet. Our city casts shadows that stretch far and wide (Source: Davies & Young 2022, p.165-166).

By mapping and visiting the landscapes that lie in the shadows, Unknown Fields starts to think about what it means to intervene in the city. … Totally. As designers operating within sites, we need to think about new forms of design practice, but also of representation, which deal with a new conceptualization of site, moving away from the bounded idea of the site plan to an understanding of the site of, say, London or Los Angeles as multifarious and atomized and ­existing across the entirety of the Earth (Source: Young in Fogelberg 2024, np link).

[Unknown Fields] are preoccupied by how envisioning [industrial] places and relationships can come to alter perceptions, and be generative for speculation: how understanding the entanglement of here and there can help develop new cultural relationships with climate change and the by-products of industry (Source: Portus 2018, np link).

[Karianne Fogelberg:] Unknown Fields started as a research studio at ­university, but then turned into a run-and-gun film crew. What does this mean, and how did this change come about? [Liam Young:] Unknown Fields began as an educational research project at the Architectural Association in London. We would bring in researchers, students, artists – people that were interested in collecting the stories of the places with us. The documentation initially involved forms of architectural research like drawings, mappings, more traditional forms of repre­sentation, but as we continued down the years, the questions that we were exploring oftentimes no longer required the techniques of architects and designers, but those of investigative journalists (Source: Fogelberg 2024, np link).

A viable model of a relevant contemporary design practice must involve some degree of travel or, at the very least, understand­ing of the planetary conditions in which we work. With Unknown Fields, we started making films and telling stories because it seemed the most powerful way of operating and connecting to audiences in order to represent that complexity and to present design problems and propositions (Source: Young in Fogelberg 2024, np link).

We create portraits of a place that sits between documentary and fiction, a city of fragments, of drone footage and hidden camera investigations, of interviews and speculative narratives, of toxic objects, reimagined landscapes and distributed matter from distant sites. We tell stories from the constellation of elsewheres conjured into being by the city’s wants and needs, fears and dreams (Source: Davies & Young 2022, p.165-166).

[Karianne Fogelberg:] To what degree is Unknown Fields inspired by the tradition of the site visit in architectural education? Or is it rather a departure from it? [Liam Young:] The architectural expedition has always been fundamental to the discipline. That said, these modes of travel often involved a privileged architect dropping into some place, identifying a problem and attempting to solve it by overlaying a single solution across a context that has frequently been the subject of attempts to understand it through the microcosm of a single field trip. That imposition of singular, very often Western design perspectives on foreign contexts has been part of the Grand Tour narrative of Western architects traveling to the sites of antiquity or to the Orient as a means of finding inspiration or stealing ideas, and it is systemic within the discipline even now. Unknown Fields is striving to move away from that model and instead sees travel as a mode of listening, which privileges and acknowledges the people who have spent their lives in the places we visit and tries to understand them. We go to a place not to solve its problems, but rather to listen to and collect its stories, and we then use our platform and aesthetic practice to help amplify those stories and introduce new audiences to these contexts. It is a process of mapping and revealing the complexities within which we’re sitting, which are either hiding in plain sight, so commonplace that they become invisible, or are obscured behind the dominant media narrative, and of trying to create accurate images of what constitutes the present moment (Source: Fogelberg 2024, np link).

Each year we navigate a different global supply chain and seek to map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures (Source: Smith 2014, np link).

[Unknown Fields Division] has undertaken trips to the mines of Madagascar, the Australian Outback, the new wildernesses of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, secret US military bases, the ‘ghost cities’ of China’s Special Economic Zones, and the toxic lakes, refineries, and vast open-cast rare earth mines of Inner Mongolia (Source: Maughan 2015, np link).

[There were] two expeditions [to China for a project called A World Adrift] (Source: Campbell-Dollaghan 2014, np link).

In August … (Source: Smith 2015, np link).

… 2014 … Unknown Fields Division … (Source: Mufson 2024, np link).

… trac[ed] the shadows of the world’s desires across China Seas along supply chains and cargo routes, to explore the dispersed choreographies and atomised geographies that global sea trade brings into being (Source: Smith 2014, np link).

… with a team consisting of studio co-founder Liam Young … and designer Kate Davies (Source: Mufson 2024, np link).

Joining us on our journey were a series of collaborators and specialists from the worlds of design, technology, science, art and fiction. Investigative photographer Toby Smith, author Tim Maughan, data visualizer and information architect Sha Hwang, programmer Dan Williams and many more combined to formed a travelling studio, carrying out research visits, field reportage, rolling discussions and impromptu tutorials that are being produced in a publication and film (Source: Smith 2014, np link).

Toby Smith is an award-winning contemporary reportage photographer specialising in landscape, environment and energy. Since graduating with an MA Photography from LCC his time is divided between personal, editorial and contemporary works for exhibition (Source: Unknown Fields Division nd, np link).

Our journey … has taken us behind the scenes of the modern world, along a cross-section of this supply chain. From source to sea, we chronicled the journey of this and that, bits and bobs and thingamajigs; via the mega ports of Shanghai and Busan our route will take in some of the biggest cargo infrastructure on earth and we rode alongside containers of stuffed toys and football scarves, remote control cars and microwaves, setting sail through the shipping lanes of the East China Sea and beyond (Source: Smith 2014, np link).

Tim Maughan is a British writer using both fiction and non fiction to explore issues around cities, art, class, and technology. His debut short story collection Paintwork received critical acclaim when released in 2011, and his short story Limited Edition was shortlisted for the 2012 BSFA short fiction award. He sometimes makes films, too (Source: Unknown Fields Division nd, np link).

[My] trip was organised and funded by the Unknown Fields Division, a group of architects, academics and designers at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London (Source: Maughan 2014a, np link).

Maughan joined the Unknown Field Division as an embedded writer . … They started the trip with seven days as guests on a huge Maersk line container ship (Source: Maughan 2015, np link).

The crew began by climbing aboard massive cargo ships bound for Chinese ports, then docked along with thousands of cargo containers (Source: Campbell-Dollaghan 2014, np link).

Hitching a ride on some of the world’s most advanced commercial ships was, as Young tells me, mostly just a matter of asking. They contacted Maersk, the Danish company that is by far the biggest shipping corporation in the world, to ask that it allow six of their members aboard Maersk vessels arriving in Yantian, a port in Shenzhen, around the same time. After he had assured Maersk’s reps that the group wasn’t preparing an expose on international shipping, things fell into place quickly. Aboard six different Maersk cargo ships all destined for Shenzhen, the members of Young and Davies’ expedition got a taste of life aboard the ships that are the lifeblood of the global economy. … Young describes the crew as exceptionally welcoming and eager to share the culture of the ship with the researchers. For example, the nationality of each captain ends up defining much about life on board, right down to the food served to the crew. ‘You have these strange drifting pockets of England, or India, or Philippines, drifting across the ocean,’ Young says. Often, the crew doesn’t know the cargo they’re carrying -unless it’s hazardous or needs refrigeration. Young’s ship, for example, was carrying fish meal from South America to China, where it’s used as feed in China’s massive agricultural and livestock industry. ‘Beyond that, the crew knows nothing about what’s in the containers,’ he says. ‘They like to speculate. They like to imagine what it is they’re transiting around the world.’ But most of the time, they only find out if an errant container pops open (Source: Campbell-Dollaghan 2014, np link).

Tim Maughan: So what are we doing here? Why have you dragged me out onto this ship? Liam Young: We’re interested in exploring behind the scenes of the contemporary city. We hang out in London and for most people an experience in London is a singular point on the map. But London is not a singular point on a map; it’s this atomised set of places that’s constructed by a huge array of distributed landscapes and systems. In order to understand London, in order to understand what it is as a contemporary mega-city, you’ve got to ride the supply chain. You’ve got to unpick and unravel the infrastructural systems and travel through the territories that we talk about as being behind the scenes of the city, the hidden or invisible landscapes that are fundamental to shaping and constructing our cultural experiences and relationships. We’re in a privileged enough position to be able to go out and see them. Most people don’t have access to the stuff that we get to see. Part of our role is bearing witness, bringing back stories, and re-presenting them in a way that people who don’t have the opportunity to see them, can meaningfully connect to these territories. Hopefully we start to engender new kinds of cultural relationships with what these landscapes might be; because I don’t know what the end game ultimately is, but I think there’s something critical in revealing them (Source: Maughan 2015, np link).

[Disembarking in China, the Unknown Fields team went] to the massive wholesale market where international buyers snap up everything from Christmas decorations and RC planes; then to the factories and worker dorms themselves, and then deeper into Inner Mongolia, to the villages where the rare earth elements used to build electronics are mined (Source: Campbell-Dollaghan 2014, np link).

The Chinese city of Yiwu, about 250 kilometers from Shanghai, is often referred to as China’s ‘Christmas village’ thanks to the massive amount of holiday-related merchandise made there. Xinhua, China’s state-news agency, claims that 60% of the world’s Christmas goods come from Yiwu. The products are often assembled by hand in primitive conditions (Source: Timmons & Timmons 2022, np link).

Christmas is made in Yiwu. … That tree lighting up your lounge. Those decorations hanging from the ceiling. That novelty stocking filler you bought for your child. They’re all made here (Source: Davies & Young 2022, p.166).

Christmas consumables are produced in summer ready for wholesale, packaging and shipping to principally western markets (Source: Smith 2015, np link).

Unknown Fields Division … traveled to Yiwu with photographer Toby Smith to see the locals at work (Source: Timmons & Timmons 2022, np link).

I’m here with Unknown Fields Division … part of a group of students, writers and film-makers following the global supply chain back to the source of many of our consumer goods. And today, this quest has brought us to what may be the world capital of Christmas tat (Source: Maughan 2014a, np link).

Getting into a massive factory making Christmas decorations in Yiwu required us to pose as British buyers, and getting there with a camera required a narrative of the need to collect material to take back to our investors, or hidden camera photography (Source: Young in Fogelberg 2024, np link).

[There,] young girls, paid per unit, feverishly glue and stich decorations to red felt Santa’s hats and tree ornaments before export to an American department store (Source: Unknown Fields Division 2014, np link).

I watch a girl sew white fur trim onto red felt at the rate of about two hats per minute, and as she finishes one she simply pushes it off the front of her desk where they fall, silently on an ever-icreasing pile on the floor. Upstairs is the plastic moulding room, mainly staffed by young men, stripped to the waist because of the heat. The air here is thick with fumes, the smell of chemicals and warm plastic. The men feed plastic pellets from Samsung-branded sacks into machines to be melted down, and then pressed into moulds to make toy snowmen and Father Christmases. It’s repetitive, and potentially dangerous, as the workers must constantly reach inside the large presses. Many of them pass the time while they work watching Chinese TV dramas on their smartphones (Source: Maughan in Unknown Fields 2016, np).

As the [Xmas Unwrapped] video shows, making the world’s Christmas decor is a messy, labor-intensive affair that relies more on human beings than automation. ‘From a health and safety perspective the exposure to harmful chemicals and solvents is disturbing,’ Smith told [us]. ‘I also witnessed manufacturing techniques with machines that could easily be criticized from a Western vantage point.  However the social working environment, working hours and general atmosphere of the factory was actually more pleasant than I have experienced in other manufacturing sectors’ (Source: Timmons & Timmons 2022, np link).

… embedded photographer Toby Smith … edited the (Source: Mufson 2024, np link).

… [and] embedded writer Tim Maughan[‘s] .. text fragments were originally published on BBC Futures [see Maughan 2014a, np link] (Unknown Fields 2016, np).

In December 2014, [Maughan] published a story in the BBC ​about his visit to the markets and factories of Yiwu, where over 60 percent of the world’s Christmas decorations are made. It went viral (Source: Maughan 2014b, np link).

It’s not just seeing Christmas being made in August that’s disorientating, but also the scale of the manual labour that’s involved that surprises me. Perhaps I was naive, but if you’d asked me before I visited Yiwu how Christmas decorations are made I’d have guessed they were mass produced in largely automated factories. But the truth here is actually the real secret of China’s manufacturing success – keeping labour costs so low that making things by hand is cheaper than using machines. I was never given a definite figure, but I’m told by one of the factory managers that employees here are paid somewhere between $200 and $300 (£130 to £190) a month to work 12-hour-plus shifts, six days a week. It allows small companies like Yiwu Hangtian Arts and Crafts to get started with relatively little investment, while giving them the flexibility to adapt and change what they produce to fit their customers’ needs. As we leave, we get a glimpse of boxes of Christmas decorations being loaded into a shipping container heading to the mega-port of Ningbo. There it would be transported on a container ship to… who knows where. I’m told that most of the decorations are headed to the US and Europe, with Russia being a new, large, and very lucrative market. Watching Christmas being assembled by hand in front of us that day, I heard more than one person in our group remark that the holiday season will never be the same again. Perhaps they were right. It felt like we’d been given just a small glimpse at China’s vast manufacturing infrastructure. More importantly it felt like we were starting to understand why it existed: so that young workers in a far country can make the rest of the world our disposable, impulse-buy goods. The implications of this, for so many things from climate change to unemployment, were dizzying to comprehend. We’re told that by the end of September, Christmas manufacturing will have stopped, and the factory will have switched to making Easter and Valentine’s Day gifts and trinkets. After that, it’s Halloween decorations for the lucrative American market. Then, by late spring, it’s Christmas time again. As long as the world wants to celebrate whatever and whenever event it cares to choose, China will be there to be its ultimate party supplier (Sore: Maughan 2014a, np link).

Ahead of the main body of documentary work from the field trip we’ve released this sattirical Xmas card [-Xmas Unwrapped]. More of a jab at Western Consumption than Chinese production (Source: Smith 2015, np link).

After having talked to Young about the trip, I was shocked by the complete lack of self-righteousness as he described what they had seen. That’s maybe the most telling thing about the project – the awareness that ‘we’re all complicit in this world that we’ve create for ourselves,’ as Young says. ‘We’re trying to talk about these very nuanced and complex relationships that we’re all entwined within.’ Their goal isn’t to shame people into not participating in modern life, but to understand the systems that enable our lifestyles and belongings – the provenance of which we rarely consider – and, maybe, find a better way (Source: Campbell-Dollaghan 2014, np link).

deng-dong-deng… so catchy (Source: @Venturilife 2017, np link).

[To Toby Smith:] Just want to point out that you used a Hong Kong Cantonese version of ‘Jingle Bell’ as background music about sweatshops in mainland China, where the official language is Mandarin and Cantonese, or any other regional dialects, are strongly discouraged (Source: @trulahn 2014, np link).

Brilliantly photographed and edited (Source: @howellb1 2014, np link)!

They may make a lot but believe me they do not make all or even most of the decorations – Many many come from Europe (Source: @CoxSoxJox 2018, np link).

We should trade more, it is awesome! XD (Source: @ahmedhassani4308 2014, np link).

These images may serve as a reminder that, although Christmas is a time to share love and happiness, it is also a festivity full of marketing and advertising. Maybe now, before we buy a Christmas ornament, let’s think of the thousands of workers who make them day by day and the lousy conditions in which they do it (Source: Saavedra 2014, np link).

No matter whether Christian or not, Christmas has somehow infected the whole world (Source: Göcmener 2021, np link).

And even though she’s thousands of miles away, you’ll never get that image of the poor Chinese girl at the sewing out of your head after you see her make a mountain of Santa Hats (Source: MIKA27 2014, np link).

I kinda wanna barf (Source: Dawson 2014, np link).

A departure point for Seymour when thinking about the China trip was the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky [see our page on a film about his work here], whose photography aims to achieve a similar ‘drawing to attention’ as Consumed and Unknown Field Divisions work. There is a similar sense of an ‘architectural scale’ in Seymour and Burtynsky’s work too. Seymour’s shots of endless shipping containers parallel Burtynsky’s images of industrial sprawl. Although in Burtynsky and Seymour’s work the intention is to point to the impact of these landscapes and places, they are portrayed in such a way that they take on an odd beauty. There is a friction here between the desire to depict the consequences of development and consumerism and the portrayal of industrial and polluted landscapes, which leads to sense of an almost industrial sublime. Consumed manages to avoid remaining entirely in this mode however through the character of Chen Li Ming, who we hear describing his life working in the factory, over the repetitive din of machines.  Chen Li Ming explains how he has worked in the factory for 11 years, and that his hands are his livelihood; the factories in China have not caught up with the automation in countries like South Korea. He speaks of how hard life in the factory is, but he also talks of how proud he is of the work he does. As he speaks the scale of production becomes clear as the camera pans rooms full of gold, silver, red and green Christmas baubles, and closes in on a worker sewing a beard onto a Santa’s bare face.  It is October, and Chen explains that it is the busiest time of the year as the factory prepares goods for the Western Holidays (Source: Portus 2018, np link).

I feel good about the worth of my work. When I see the work of my hands in the city, in the shops, I feel proud (Source: Chen Li Ming in Seymour 2017, 16.22 – 16.35 link)

Despite the scenes with Chen Li Ming appearing as a straight forward character profile one would expect in documentary film, Chen is fictitious and was built through interviews Seymour conducted with different factory workers. This was a result of being unable to get a decent sit down interview and the difficulty of trying to talk to people whilst they worked. But it was also due to the fact that Seymour’s interviewees were often being overlooked by their bosses, meaning they rarely divulged the reality of their workplace. But Seymour feels, ‘it was one of those situations where fiction became more true than fact’. The stitching together of different stories and thoughts from different people in the factory creates a rounder depiction, and a better insight into life working in a Chinese factory (Source: Portus 2018, np link).

Consumed takes the fiction-truer-than-fact approach throughout. It is a meshwork of narratives and disparate scenes, coming together to form a vision we would not otherwise see or be able to quite conceive. It does this in part by exposing the phantasmagoria of commodities and the stories behind their magical apparition. We see the dirty process of mineral extraction that sits behind the superficial cleanliness of our phones screens, and the labour that goes into festive ornamentation. Through Chen Li Ming it also reveals the life of a factory worker in a factory, as well challenging perceptions of what that may be like. … It can be seen to achieve … the role of artworks for thinking ecologically: they enable a questioning and disrupting of a known reality, through exposing one’s complicity in ecological conditions.  Yet Consumed also suffers in a way that film, photography and art that takes the brave move of trying to portray the complexity of supply chains, environmental damage and vast industrial landscapes often do. Despite the horror of what is being portrayed, a strange majesty is evoked. There is a closing of distance in one sense, but an opening in another (Source: Portus 2018, np link).