Between Here and There: Cape Town

Infecting the City Public Art and Performance Festival, Cape Town, South Africa, 2013

The ongoing Between Here and There series combines original video footage of maritime shipping routes and ports with architectural video mapping in public spaces.  Videos of ports, rivers and oceans captured at some of the largest container ports and most important shipping routes in the world, including sites in China, The United States, Panama, France, Portugal, Spain, The United Kingdom, Thailand, The Netherlands, and Germany, and are combined with footage of maritime shipping locations captured locally at the site of exhibition.  This work, exhibited on The Slave Lodge, one of the oldest buildings in Cape Town, South Africa and former site of slave accommodations, Government offices and South Africa’s Supreme Court, included footage from The Bay of Cape Town, The Huangpu River in Shanghai, The Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, and The Ohio River in New Albany, Indiana (the home of the artist).  Because of the building’s history, and its current role as a museum that depicts the long history of slavery in South Africa, Between Here and There: Cape Town alluded to the role the Port of Cape Town had in the colonialisation and the forced migration and labor of native South Africans.

In this series of work, Carbonneau documents sites that represent the massive system that is global trade, while tracking the ways her own environment, community and economy is linked to others on an international level.  By investigating the benefits and consequences of a hyper connected world,and embedding the video in public spaces by using video mapping technologies, this massive international system is presented on a scale that is physically tangible and relatable to the human body, allowing the audience to grasp the physical enormity of the global economy, while highlighting the significance of our built environment within our modern and historic cultural framework.

Between Here and There: Cape Town was supported by The Africa Centre and this successful Kickstarter Campaign.