
Nadja Abt
“The maritime world interested me, as it is a world of gigantic automation, but also of persistent, isolated, anonymous, occult, a work of great solitude, where there is a huge dislocation and separation from the domestic sphere” [1] (Allan Sekula, 2002)
In order to arrive at Pivô in São Paulo, to start a residency, I went on a cargo ship from Hamburg, Germany to Santos, Brazil in early February 2017. It took 18 days with two stopovers, one in Antwerp, Belgium and one in Le Havre, France. I chose to travel with Hamburg Süd, one of the oldest German Ship Companies that has been running the German-Brazilian route since 1871.
On the ship I documented the different work of the crew and the spaces with photos and kept a daily diary. After arriving in São Paulo, I produced a short essay-film out of the material I had collected: Stories that were told after work and explanations to many questions that I had asked, pictures from ship details and seafarers and journals from the seafarer`s mission. Its formal structure is a reference to the short film „Der Tag eines unständigen Hafenarbeiters“ (The day of a casual dock worker) from 1966 by the German photographer Leonore Mau and author Hubert Fichte. The artist couple also travelled a lot to Brazil during the late 60s and 70s, in order to document various religious practices such as Candomblé, Umbanda and Tambor de Mina.
In my short film, I focus on the female seafarers that are still underrepresented in the sector of maritime work. The voiceover text is based on a mixture of journalistic reports, talks that I had with the two female seafarers that were on the ship and my own experiences on board.
The woman as a seafarer represents the strongest contraposition to the world of domestic labor and, in this way, to the housewife. Her working space has been formed and dominated by only men since hundreds of years – it is just lately that big shipping companies such as MAERSK and Hamburg Süd start campaigns to recruit female seafarers. Being usually the only woman on board, their physical strength is often tested by their colleagues. The female trainees usually have to prove themselves twice as much as their male fellows.
Working and living in that male dominated world that consists of an approximately 330m extent, the woman is an intruder in, how Foucault described it, a prison-like Heterotopia.[2] The ship has always been a big area of projections and metaphors in the arts as well as in literature. Its secret society of men combined rawness and romanticism. “What happens on a ship, stays on a ship” is a rule that still counts today and feeds even more the imagination by “the others on land”. So, one can say, that the woman intrudes and opens up that imaginary world of a Melvillesque male crew with its own rules. Changing her role from prostitute in the harbours, so explored in seafarer novels and paintings to an effective crewmember.
In the book Caliban and the witch, the Italian feminist activist Silvia Federici points out that the capitalist system as it is dominating and destroying the world today could arise only through the repression of the woman from the paid labor market into the world of domestic unpaid labor.[3] The mill wheel of capitalism is represented by the huge cargoships with thousands of containers which enter the ports every hour. The labor which keeps that wheel running is often forgotten, as Allan Sekula already emphasized in his texts. So, if we combine Federici`s thesis with that of Sekula, the woman`s entrance in the world of seafaring creates a very interesting new role: On the one hand she is directly responsible for capitalist trade and far away from any conservative stereotype of a housewife, on the other hand her labor on board stays as invisible, unacknowledged and often underpaid as the domestic labor.
As a final event of the residency, I presented the essay film in a conversation with Brazilian artist Caio Reisewitz who also travelled by cargo ship from Santos to Rotterdam with the same German ship company in 1989. We exchanged experiences about life on board and observations on how the container trade has developed during the last 30 years. The talk took place end of April 2017 at Pivô.
[1] Hilde Van Gelder: Allan Sekula, Ship of Fools/ The Dockers` Museum, Lisbon, 2015.
[2] Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, afterall, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack,from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the
sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.
Excerpt from: Michel Foulcault,Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, in Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, October, 1984; (Des Espaces Autres, March 1967
Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec), source here: http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf
[3] Silvia Federici: Caliban and the witch, Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY, 2004.