Container
Container makes visible the “invisible” bodies enabling consumer society. Within spitting distance of Clifton beach, a playground for privileged South Africans, lies the remains of the San Jose paquette de Africa, a Portuguese slave ship that sank in 1794, with 212 shackled slaves onboard. A few kilometers away, thousands of shipping containers, their contents invisible and rarely discussed, enter and leave Cape Town’s busy port. Container explores the hidden world of goods crisscrossing the globe in anonymous containers to highlight the lives of the millions of invisible people shackled in modern day slavery.
Simon Wood is an Emmy nominated filmmaker based in Cape Town, South Africa. Wood’s films have screened at the worlds largest film festivals and won numerous awards in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America.
Meghna Singh is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cape Town and a research associate at the African Centre for Migration and Society at WITS University Johannesburg. Hailing from New Delhi, India, she is currently pursuing visual art practice and a research project on the theme of oceanic migrations in South Africa. Working with mediums of video and installation, blurring boundaries between documentary and fiction, she creates immersive environments highlighting issues of ‘humanism’ through the tool of the imaginary. Her current focus is on the theme of critical mobilities, migration and the invisible class of mobile population that move around the world as a consequence of the capitalist globalized world we inhabit. Working with the visual as a methodology to conduct and present research, she received a project grant from Jo Vearey as a part of the Migration and Health Project funding through the Wellcome Trust, U.K.