On Logistics Landscapes
Fredi Fischli, Niels Olsen, and Irene Chin in conversation with Tadeáš Říha and Kateřina Frejlachová
- NO
- In your work on logistics landscapes, the notion of landscape from an art-historical perspective seems to be at the core of your method.
- TR
- The notion of landscape was a point of departure or a lens through which we decided to look at these structures. We imagined that we were travellers or explorers that came across these vast spaces and explored them as a new phenomenon. Using the established art-historical concept of landscape seemed important. We were interested to find out that developers are using a similar kind of tool to present and market the warehouses, producing powerful aerial photographs of the warehouses always in a natural setting, surrounded by green and animals and water, with nice vast horizons and forests in the background. And we thought we could use this as a starting point to unpack other topics that have to do with landscape, such as land ownership, land use, and population of the land and the kind of relationship to taking the land.
- KF
- This way of looking at warehouses allowed us to look not just at their architecture, at the buildings, but at broader topics. Landscape is a system that is also cultural and political.
Miroslav Pazdera, Logistics Landscapes, 2019. From the project Steel Cities, 2020, Kateřina Frejlachová, Miroslav Pazdera, Tadeáš Říha and Martin Špičák. © Miroslav Pazdera
- FF
- It’s interesting to look at the warehouse as a landscape, because in a lot of these buildings, the outside as much as the inside are about aesthetics. Another interesting thing that you looked at while considering this landscape is the actual positioning of the warehouses.
- KF
- Yes, in the context of Central Europe and specifically in the Czech Republic, we did some research on how these structures are distributed. Usually there is not just one warehouse but a cluster of buildings. And there are a couple of types of these logistics centres. There are clusters located in the outskirts of big cities that provide the cities with goods, and there are also warehouses located in more distant border regions, which are unique because they usually serve markets other than the Czech market. The fulfilment centres where goods are stored temporarily before being shipped abroad are especially interesting in terms of landscape because they are isolated, semi-urban spaces, many located near a highway or in small villages. How is landscape defined and understood in this context?
- NO
- Your project also peered inside these spaces to explore how they are inhabited and organized, especially in terms of their labour conditions. I’m quite curious about your insight into the ways these enormous buildings are occupied, which might not be evident to a consumer.
- TR
- We uncovered a particular connection between workers and machines that changed our understanding of the relationship between automation and labour in a slightly dystopic way, I must say. For example, a scanner interfaces between workers and the online network of the warehouse—it communicates instructions; it collects data; and it directs workers around the warehouse. It often tracks the speed of their work and, in some cases, warns them that they are not working efficiently. Scanners are also used to manage cultural and linguistic difference in these warehouses. For instance, warehouses employ workers from various countries and not everyone speaks fluent Czech, but the system can be adjusted to accommodate different languages.
Miroslav Pazdera, Logistics Landscapes, 2019. From the project Steel Cities, 2020, Kateřina Frejlachová, Miroslav Pazdera, Tadeáš Říha and Martin Špičák. © Miroslav Pazdera
- TR:
- Where previously there was at least a possibility of a unified work force, simply stemming from hundreds of people operating in the same space, this possibility is now becoming more difficult to realize, something that is slightly concerning. Of course, these systems increase efficiency and speed, which means it’s cheap and easy for the e-commerce tribes, but the consequences of these little improvements and efficiencies upon people’s lives in the warehouses is rather dystopian.
- NO
- You mentioned how you conducted excursions to these sites to investigate their organization, and I’m curious to know if you plan to look further into this landscape, or where you are directing your practice now.
- KF
- I can tell you a bit about the excursion to one of the logistics centres located near the German border in Western Bohemia. We knew that a dormitory had been built inside for workers, so we were curious about how the space functioned, was organized, etc. We went on an official guided tour of the centre and learned about how the dormitory operates. But then we visited its surroundings, curious about life in the nearby villages.
Randomly, we came across a kind of semi-official dormitory and got the opportunity to discuss with the people living in these other dormitories but also working in the fulfilment centre. There was a big contrast between the people living in these informal conditions and the people who operate the centre. Both work at the fulfilment centre and they inhabit the place but have different points of view. We also tried to meet people that live in this area, in the towns or cities nearby to understand how they look at these new forms of, let’s say, space in their surroundings.
If you approach the logistics centre as an outsider, you feel very small because the place is huge, it’s not built for humans, it is very hard to interact with these structures in any way. You only find small traces of human activity. - FF
- Considering their scale, I’m curious as to how these places can be inhabited or humanized by the workers.
- KF
- The space is multi-layered: there is the building, which is pure typological stuff; then you have the system, the algorithms, the rows of shelves—everything that is planned inside; and then you have the people who work there. And if you work there and you see that the system is not logical for you or for your colleagues, you must somehow hack it. So, there are a lot of DIY things like self-made shopping bags, hand-written notes, or smokers’ sheds with seats made from the tools they use.
- FF
- How would you describe the warehouse employees?
Miroslav Pazdera, Logistics Landscapes, 2019. From the project Steel Cities, 2020, Kateřina Frejlachová, Miroslav Pazdera, Tadeáš Říha and Martin Špičák. © Miroslav Pazdera
- TR
- Warehouse employees can be divided into regular employees and agency workers, two very different groups. Regular employees mostly live in nearby cities and commute or have a house close to the warehouse. Agency workers are a more problematic category. The whole logistics industry is of low added value and the profit margins are very slim, and so it needs to be extremely flexible in terms of staffing—which is often outsourced through the agency workers “supplied” by various subcontractors. The desired flexibility directly translates into precarity for the agency workers.
Sometimes these workers live in a small, illegal dormitory in a converted house like the one we saw. They move frequently. The social division between the regular staff and the agency workers was also maintained by the staff. We heard that regular staff don’t want to mingle with the agency workers—they host separate parties and eat lunch at different times. They have different financial conditions and different work conditions, even though they all do the same work. - FF
- So, agencies are at the top of a hierarchy?
- TR
- One of the reasons people end up working for agencies is that it is otherwise difficult to find accommodation in these remote places. Since the agencies also control the accommodation, they subcontract workers as resources. They organize accommodation, issue contracts, and often oversee disciplinary matters. This of course, blurs the line between work and private life.
- NO
- Have you followed the development of these workspaces since your work on them in 2019?
- TR
- Their presence is growing, though I am not completely up to speed. During COVID, some of these places, especially those close to the German border, became hotspots of the epidemic because many people from different environments lived in constrained spaces.
- FF
- I also wonder about the future of online shopping, which brought about this retail apocalypse. These warehouses stand for an ideal of globalization, of ever-growing capitalism. With recent world events such as Brexit, rising nationalism, is a new kind of retail apocalypse on the horizon? Do current international affairs signal trouble for fulfilment centres that rely on a smooth national system in order to operate?
Miroslav Pazdera, Logistics Landscapes, 2019. From the project Steel Cities, 2020, Kateřina Frejlachová, Miroslav Pazdera, Tadeáš Říha and Martin Špičák. © Miroslav Pazdera
- TR
- That’s a big question. I think it can go many ways. There are four possible answers. There is an optimistic failure one, and there is a pessimistic failure one. There is an optimistic success and a pessimistic success. So I think…well, if I just go for the optimistic answer, these developments show us that these are critical nodes of a core contemporary form of capitalism. And the workers and the local communities have a power of leverage over the whole system that they would not have necessarily recognized earlier. There are promising developments toward worker unionization in the Czech case. Workers can significantly disrupt the system.
Of course, larger companies are aware of this vulnerability and can manipulate the structure of the company to their advantage, both to increase efficiency or suppress the agency of workers. - KF
- I agree. These fulfilment centres are usually part of a bigger system of operations, whose relations are unpredictable. We might assume that developers might move eastward because of the price of labour and property, but the reality of this choice is complicated by geopolitics. So, it’s not easy to predict, I think.
- IC
- Can you speculate how these abstract, steel warehouses might become new ruins if and when their system of operation breaks? Because we see now how the department store, once a spatial typology of a certain era, is being transformed and redefined through consumer rights and labour reforms.
- TR
- We do imagine this ruination in our book Steel Cities, not so much in a social sense, but its physical degradation. The fact that warehouses are structures that seem to translate abstract systems such as the supply chain, capitalism, into physical form, is one of the reasons that we are interested in them in the first place. The ruination of the warehouse is interesting, because at one point warehouses constituted about one third of all construction in Czechia. The destruction of these structures would be significant, almost geological in terms of the ways they shape the landscape.
They are essentially concrete slabs adjusted to the terrain. Since they are very large and need to be flat in a landscape that isn’t very flat, the adjustments to the terrain can be substantial. The necessary changes, such as soil mounds or water reservoirs, sometimes resemble land art installations. And then you have these flat slabs of warehouses that usually occupy about twenty-five percent of the land, and then much larger areas taken up by parking and asphalt. How does the landscape look if the steel super-structure disappears?
We found it fascinating that for developers and some of the regulatory bodies in Czechia, these developments are not viewed as particularly unsustainable. In one example, the agricultural landscape that was to be built over was presented as an environmental risk due to contemporary agricultural practices like water management, soil treatment, or fertilization. The developer’s argument was that building over these fields constituted an improvement in terms of existing CO2 production.
After looking into them, we found that these statements were incorrect, but the idea that building a warehouse on former agricultural land can be considered a more sustainable practice than continuing to grow whatever was there before was extraordinary to us. The warehouse in its present form is basically another type of unsustainable landscape. Sometimes we destroy the environment a bit more, sometimes a bit less. So, pouring concrete over a green field is only an incremental worsening of how we already treat the natural world.
Retail Apocalypse is curated by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen. The exhibition is currently on view in the Hall Cases and Octagonal gallery and runs until 15 January 2023.
