You Can't Automate Me
2021, experimental documentary directed by Katarina Jazbec
Before container-ships leave port, lashers secure the containers using heavy metal bars. They are the last port workers to do such dangerous jobs surrounded by self-driven vehicles and remotely operated cranes. Each body tells its own story: from grieving for a colleague who died on the job to just keep going. Stowaway animals appear as visions of nature beyond the illusion of human control.
You Can’t Automate Me is an experimental documentary, taking place at Maasvlakte, a massive man-made extension of the Rotterdam harbour. At the center of the film are so-called lashers, a largely unknown workers community, who secure containers using heavy metal bars so container-ships can leave the port. The film’s structure and cinematic language consist of touching lashers’ stories, movement scores, sequences of work and rest, surreal landscapes of the harbour, CG animated stowaway animals that come with ships, and the cleaner of the containers as a narrator. Switching between levels of reality, we follow lashers slipping in and out of work in dreamy sequences amidst a steady day and night rhythm. The movement scores performed by workers unveil the imaginary and sensory potentialities of their working gestures and spaces that surround them. The concept and the film process bring together multiple worlds (workers, animals, big corporations, the audience, the spiritual, future, past). It facilitates encounters that unfold the invisible co-existence and interdependence of these parallel spaces.
[from Jazbec's website]
CAST: Martines Simmons, Toby Slager, Django Binder, Shennen Jamanika, BrownPinas, Lars Masselink, Misja Vos • PRODUCERS: Sem Janssen, Katarina Jazbec • PRODUCTION: TENT Film • CINEMATOGRAPHER: Matija Pekić • SECOND CAMERA: Jesse Immanuel Bom • EDITORS: Jesse Immanuel Bom, Katarina Jazbec • SOUND DESIGNER: Jorick Bronius • MUSIC: Giliam Spliethoff, Jorick Bronius • CHOREOGRAPHY: Angeliki Diakrousi, Katarina Jazbec • CG ANIMATION, VFX AND COMPOSITING: Ryan Cherewaty
The Handbook for Eyes, Bones, Muscles, Skin and Dreams
(A5, booklet, 2020)
Together with Katarina we developed a series of movements that were introduced to the lashers. A handbook with exercises explained in detail were given to them. The exercises were based on Feldenkrais, Butoh, Deep Listening, Amerindian multinaturalism and the lashers' techniques. Some of the dancers and practitioners that inspired us are the butoh dancers Masaki Iwana, Natsu Nakajima and Moeno Wakamatsu, the dancer and Feldenkrais practitioner Mai Tasaka and the composer Pauline Oliveros. The act of performing the scores with lashers became an attempt in rendering each other capable of response. While The Handbook bridged the gap between the language of movement arts and lashers’ context.
It is invisible what guides you along the way
(A3, riso poster, front and back side, 2021)
"This riso poster, designed by Tessa Meeus and published by PrintRoom, gives an insight into The Handbook for Eyes, Bones, Muscles, Skin, and Dreams (2020), a collection of movement scores that we developed together with Angeliki Diakrousi and made into booklets that were given to lashers. Responding to our increasingly automated bodies, the scores address all the workers of the Capitalocene as Haraway puts it nicely. The Handbook emerged from extensive research and desire to understand the experience of human and animal bodies in the harbour of Rotterdam, an engine of our economy, in an embodied manner. In the long period of exploring the harbour, I encountered lashers whose work came incredibly close to my research questions."
[from Jazbec's website]
