Last week I presented my iterations on receipt paper. One sheet showed a traditional 40-hour workweek and the other a 112-hour workweek.
The idea here is to attach the work to the gated fence next to which I did my first rider interview with Paulo.
The label that explains the work will also have the locations of other pieces — the same spots where I conducted other interviews — and the commute time by bicycle.
References
Allan Weber is Brazilian a delivery rider and artist.
The objects, tools, of delivery riders are repurposed, recontextualised, from street to gallery, from moving to static. Photos of orders from the perspective of the rider, a worn-out backpack (branding vs reality), razor and haircuts (culture). A video shows a rider riding on a walkway, which can mean different things for different people, settings, cultures.
A rider as an artist. His tools become medium. This allows the audience to contemplate these objects and images from the life of the artist and reflect on his delivery work from a different perspective.
Allan’s work makes me reflect on what happens when a piece of art or design, is placed on the streets instead of a gallery? Will it spark curiosity? Will people stop what they’re doing and admire it, read the label? How “loud” does it have to be?
The public canvas is a signifier of culture and activism. There is a stablished visual language in which accumulated and teared wallpapers, stickers mean presence of culture, activism, and absence of police.
According to Eichhorn, “[i]n the semiotics of the city, these canvases signified that you’d arrived—in an urban scene or subculture or active social movement. Likewise, the absence of these canvases signified that you’d landed in a neighborhood that was either highly policed, berefit of culture, or both.” (pp. 82-83)
Where will my work be positioned—physically and emotionally—in the public space? Currently it is currently in the “work of art” category. One-off site-specific pieces. in contrast, Mathilda Della Torre’s Conversation from Calais are posters. Cheap and with multiple copies pasted throughout the city.
Migrant riders who have to rent accounts avoid the police. One rider told me he avoids central areas because of police presence.
Can my work act as a sign that the area is safe for delivery riders? Just by being there, does it mean that it is an area with less police?
Mathilda’s project came to be after years of in-depth conversations while doing volunteer work. There are a lot of stories. How many I need will depend on the form the project takes.
She had continuous contact with participants, which allowed them to build trust. This closeness seems genuine. It’s unlikely I’ll be able to have something similar with delivery riders, so I should accept that short hello-goodbye exchanges is as close as I’ll get to them. That’s where prompts come in handy. Also not being shy about it. Take pictures.
I should also remember that, although I’m trying to use graphic communication design to at least raise awareness to the issues delivery riders face, I am not a volunteer and I am not doing anything that directly and clearly makes a positive impact. And that’s fine, as long as I consider the participants, respect them, and don’t exploit them. How to give back the research to them?
There’s an intimacy and depth in her stories, ranging from light-hearted to tragic. As much as delivery riders struggle, they still have a job and it’s safe to assume most have a roof over their heads. The refugees in Calais are in a very vulnerable situation, living in tents, having experienced tragedies and near-death experiences.
“This “ever-growing collection focuses on capturing the diversity of experiences, and tries to resist creating new stereotypes of refugees as villains, heroic figures or hopeless victims. By pasting these posters on walls around the world, we take over public space and refuse to let the refugee narrative be dominated by mainstream media and politicians who use the same scapegoating strategies they’ve been using for years.” (Della Torre, 2023, p. 10)
The subject of branding intersects in essential ways with the platformisation phenomenon. There is the branding of platforms that communicates convenience as the key value of delivery apps, and the branding in platforms that influences the users’ decision-making process between countless restaurants and grocery stores.
Branding and platformisation are therefore entangled. It’s impossible — or insufficinent — to analyse one without the other.
As Grant and Vodeb point out, “[t]he branded, neoliberal unreal real is always constructed at the expense of the real real. Everyday political realities hide behind the rictus grin of a staged neoliberal reality — an endless enforced entrepreneurialism, where people’s lives are shattered by a program of privatised, reduced or withdrawn essential social services and welfare support. Branding, as a weapon of neoliberal instrumentality is complicit in embedding institutional inequality and disadvantage.” (2023, p. 49)
“Branding is now what we call entrenched strategies of aestheticising the concealment of social and political conflict.” (Grant, Vodeb, 2023, p. 49)
That is also the case with food delivery apps. Convenience is sold as a harmless benefit, but it comes at the expense of precarised workers.
What is the role of delivery apps in this context? Are they just tools that contribute to inequality ? For sure, but they represent a wider/broader phenomenon of their own. They contribute to the atomisation in everyday life. Everyone is glued to their individual screens, being fed content that keeps the status quo with algorithmic precision.