VIDEO TESTIMONIES, PORT CITY HINTERLAND GEOGRAPHIES
Artists: Several across the world
22 April 2022

A Port Journey’s collaboration between the Art Indeed Foundation, The University of Georgia, Harvard Graduate School of Design and Hyper Cultural Passengers
PFSL was co-founded in 2021 by Jan Derk Diekema, James Enos, Stephen Ramos, and Annie Simpson

Port Futures and Social Logistics
Port Futures and Social Logistics (PFSL) is a platform examining materials, environmental histories, and infrastructure across the world, exploring how energy transition, climate, and labor are reshaping these regions and their global connections.

Through commissioned and curated video testimonies, PFSL looks at port cities and surrounding territories as networked, living environments where global forces are felt locally. The platform connects circulation studies and struggles to broader questions of planetary urban critique, bringing together creative research and shared experience to open up thinking about public access and common ground.

Pre-selected artists, urbanists, and scientists are invited to contribute to an ongoing collection of relevant works and projects; a growing database of memory and imagination that captures how our world could, will, or should change. The collection is presented as an international Open Institute of knowledge, insight, and inspiration.

PFSL #01
The first edition of PFSL launched on Earth Day, April 22, 2022. Due to COVID restrictions, it took place entirely online, but this constraint became part of the work itself. Fourteen artists from around the world each contributed a short video made in their own immediate surroundings, turning the personal and the local into a starting point for discussing global environmental themes.

PFSL #01 brings together work from an international group of artists offering atypical planetary visualizations. They are the first in what will be a series of positioned ‘views,’ which will form a collective archive of the contemporary condition. Together, these views link together aesthetic investigations of ecological, social, and industrial flows with a renewed belief in art as a tool for situating belongingness within systems. The collective archive emerges as an inductive study of the material present. Artist-collaborators are ports, and their exchanges serve as logistics to operationalize this collective present through cultural connection; greater than mere commodity chain.

Artist-collaborators working across field recordings and found footage offer interpretations to our call: what might the planetary look like from the ground-up? Their visualizations move beyond implied, ever-distant lines of connectivity towards a depth of field typically left out of global discussions. In choosing to belong to this latent archive, artist-collaborators trace edge conditions and connections across territorial divides. When viewed as a constellation, imaginations of the sky and the sea as vast spaces for politics join a fragmented almanac of the earth, in opposition to known tropes or scales.

PFSL #01

Collaborating artist for PFSL #01:
Forrest Kelly (US)
Michael Kress (DE)
Michael Mcfalls (US)
Nick Norwood (US)
Annie Simpson (US)
James Enos (US)
Lien Truong (US)
Hong-An Truong (US)
Xin Cheng (CN)
Adam Ben-Dror (NZ)
Jan Derk Diekema (NL)
Vijay Rajkumar (US)
Miku Sato (JP)
Chang Chih Chung (TW)
Florian Braakman (NL)
Cheyenne Concepcion (US)
Soba Studio (JP)
Brian House (US)