Active cargo.
Can a passive part of the enormous manufacturing and consumption system become active?
In this case, can the transportation of an object also be the manufacturing of the object?
In 2020, 128 trillion tonne-kilometers were transported worldwide.
This is a number, an amount of shipped goods, that is impossible to grasp.
But if one would try… it resembles 16 500 tons moved one kilometer per person living in the world that year.
What would happen if one activated this passive part of the system where an item or material is moved from one place to another?
The movement is happening, but the goods are passive. Could they be active instead?
Can the energy and movement that exists within transportation be used as energy and movement for production?
What would that production look like?
What kind of processes and manufacturing methods would that be?
What kind of objects could be produced?
What kind of aesthetics would come out of this kind of production?
Europe consumes approximately twenty-five percent of the world’s raw materials but produces only three percent.
The transport sector only within the EU accounted for twenty-five percent of the Union’s total greenhouse gas emissions in 2018.
Approximately eighty percent of the Swedish wood is exported, at the same time as seventy percent of the wood we use in Sweden is imported.
This is a good example of how materials today have become global rather than local.
We have made ourselves dependent on worldwide transportations.
The fragility of this system, both access to materials and the need for shipping, has been vastly exposed by examples like the cargo ship Ever Given that got stuck in the Suez Canal, the delays in materials, spare parts and products caused by the corona pandemic, and how the West’s economic sanctions against Russia after the invasion of Ukraine have affected both material prices and delivery times.
In 2021, the cost of container shipping from China to Northern Europe increased by over 700 percent.
We have developed a system based on the search for profit that now has become its own enemy.
How can this system not already be maximised?
Why is the energy and the movement that is within shipping not used?
How can the system be totally maximised?
Active Cargo is posing questions aiming to stress the ones that still believe in the globalised production and consumption system.
Active Cargo is not presenting any solutions, but rather highlighting a missed opportunity in an already broken system.
Active Cargo is on no one’s side, it’s everywhere, but yet nowhere.