A Packet of Salt
Li Xiaofei
李消非
Production date
2013
Object Detail
Media
video (colour, sound)
Measurements
7 min 30 sec
Notes
Since 2010, Li Xiaofei has been examining the phenomenon of mass production and its impact on social structures and the individual, within and beyond China. In his continuing Assembly Line Project, he has visited factories in southern China and throughout the world. Filming interviews with workers, supervisors and managers, Li has engaged with the reality of mechanisation, exploring the subject of labour and capital in original ways. Themes that emerge from this ambitious ongoing project include relationships between workers and management, between humans and machines, and between individuals and the larger society. Matter-of-fact discussions of pay and working conditions are constantly broken up in his videos by the roar of machinery, and the visually rich imagery of the assembly line, the rotation of gears and wheels, and spinning machine parts. Li Xiaofei raises many questions about the nature of work in the modern world.The Assembly Line Daily Essentials series shifts focus. A Packet of Salt (2013) examines the production of materials used all over the world. Li Xiaofei considers the environmental cost of materials such as coal and salt:scenes from A Packet of Salt show a slowly moving barge moving downriver, a mountain of salt, and smoke billowing from factory chimneys in what seems a post-apocalyptic wasteland traversed by powerlines. Everything we use, says Li, is produced somewhere in the world on an assembly line, and they are all essentially the same. And everything we use, from salt to chocolate, from soy sauce to cooking oil, is part of a complicated network of relationships of cause and effect.
Accession number
2016.019