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Gifts & Seasonal
“Xmas Unwrapped“
A short film edited by Toby Smith and Unknown Fields Division with Tim Maughan.
Embedded above in full.
This short and catchy ‘Jingle Bells’ Christmas factory film comes from a larger project that’s rethinking architecture. The job of the architect – one co-founder of the Unknown Fields Division studio has mischievously argued – should no longer to think of buildings and cities, but of the outside that’s inside them: i.e. the hidden geographies of infrastructure, logistics, commodities and landscapes. For ‘follow the thing’ geographers hardwired into Doreen Massey’s ‘global sense of place’ [see our page on Platform London’s social sculpture Homeland here], this extroverted thinking might not seem particularly novel. But, it’s fascinating to see what can happen when new forms of architectural theory and practice are directed towards thing-following. There’s so much to learn from. First, there’s the thoroughly collaborative and inderdisciplinary studio practice of Unknown Fields Division. Second, there’s a long-running postgraduate course at the Architectural Association in London where its co-founder has taken students on infrastructural ‘expeditions’ for many years. Third, there are the writers, filmmakers, data-visualisers and programmers who have accompanied these expeditions and produced the highly-professional and publically eye-catching work. Xmas Unwrapped is an excellent example of this. For years, we’ve been embedding it on the ‘Geographies of material culture’ module website with instructions for coursework to be completed over the Christmas holidays. It’s made from observational footage of people in a dingy factory in China making Christmas decorations and Santa hats – by hand – plus other people boxing, loading and shipping loading them into a container for shipping overseas. Watch it with the sound down and it’s not that dramatic. None of the workers speak to camera. They just work. Repetitive tasks. Making familiar decorations and hats to those who celebrate Christmas. The footage does not aim – it seems – to evoke any emotion in its audience. But turn up the volume and it’s accompanied by a choir of children singing ‘Jingle Bells’ in Mandarin. That’s what seems to jar. ‘Oh what fun it is to ride on a one horse open sleigh’. What?! As one commenter put it, ‘the chinese version of jingle bells made me laugh. ding dong dang ding dong dang. im never gunna sing it in english again now’. Another wrote, ‘I kinda wanna barf’. This film (and the other outputs from the project) is a gentle form of trade justice activism. It’s trying to ‘pop the bubble’ of Western consumption by ‘join the dots’ to Chinese factory production via the infrastructure of international trade. It does not explicitly address trade injustice, exploitation, labour rights or anyone’s activism. Factory and logistics workers don’t have a voice in their representation. The project members aren’t making this work because they want its audiences to do anything. Just think. Realise that their things are made by people elsewhere in the world. The world they live in is made by others, elsewhere. Xmas Unwrapped can be used as a brief and gently provocative spark to discussions of trade (in)justice, though, not only in the classroom [like Handprint] but also – especially – around the Christmas dinner table. That’s where some impact can take place. Plus, it’s not a standalone piece of work. What about the students and collaborators who went on that expedition? What did this Christmas factory filming leave them thinking about, and doing? Who watched or read their work?
Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2025) Xmas Unwrapped. followthethings.com/xmas-unwrapped.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
Estimated reading time: 39 minutes.
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