Made in China / Epitaph

Formation: voice, flute, violoncello + video
Creation: 2020-21
Premiere: 23th July 2021. Festival Der Sommer in Stuttgart. TRIO VIS À VIS
Duration: 15 minutes

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Made in China / Epitaph departs from the poem “I fall asleep, just standing like that” by of Chinese worker poet Xu Lizhi,i who commited suicide at the age of 24 while working under quasi slave conditions at Foxconn Factory. Foxconn is the main provider of the main technological companies along the world, like Apple, Amazon, Dell, Google, Sony… The case of Xu Lizhi is not an isolated one: violations of human rights are a constant in their factories (hipersurveillance of workers, turns longer than 10 hours a day, employment of minors…), where the production rhythms are determined by the market releases of new products. In the other side, the after use of these gadgets after their slavistic production (mainly smartphones) is rather like a game, from the design of their interfaces to the relation we stablish with the world through the connectivity of apps, social networks or audiovisual content plaftorms. In the piece, these this brutal and opaque contrast between the production conditions and their anaesthetic entertainment is thematized in the way the live instruments interact with the text of the poem and the audiovisual content (mainly videos gathered as a search result of the poem words in platforms like youtube or tiktok).