Logistical Worlds 1: Piraeus

<p>The publication of this pamphlet signals the beginning of a new program of collective research that extends our interest in logistical operations along global lines of influence and connection marked by Chinese infrastructural expansion. Dubbed Logistical Worlds: Infrastructure, Software, Labour (2013-2016), this project moves between Athens, Kolkata and Valparáiso, investigating regimes of circulation and containment that connect China’s manufacturing industries to different corners of the world. Although these regimes are central to our interest, logistics applies not merely to circulation or transport, which is to say that it troubles the heuristic division between production and distribution. This is particularly evident in processes of global production where the assembly of goods across distant sites means that objects and knowledge must continually travel between locations. The reduction of transport costs through the introduction of efficient logistical systems has been an important factor in encouraging the relocation of industrial facilities to sites where the cost of labour infrastructure and software combine as technologies of governance that coordinate and control is cheaper. Logistics has thus contributed to the production of an increasingly heterogeneous arrangement of global space and time…</p>