In December 2018, I hired myself for a short time at the Amazon fulfillment center in Sady near Poznań to see from the inside how one of the biggest companies in the world operates on a micro scale. In this way, I started working on the AMZN project, which main aim is to shed light on the entire functioning of this internet giant: from the materiality of huge warehouses, to working conditions, to specific corporate culture and versatility, to visions of the future, created by the company management.
How can we relate to them and can we even take our future back from the hands of the world’s wealthiest people? How can we support those fighting for workers’ rights and, in a broader perspective, equality and social justice? Amazon is just an example, albeit an extremely powerful and clear one, of what our whole reality may soon look like. Or how it already looks: hidden behind a smooth online store interface and an almost windowless warehouse walls. Dressed in exciting technological metaphors, hiding the exploitation and inequality of wealth, knowledge and influence.
AMZN is a multi-media, multi-threaded project, the core of which is a series of photographs of the company’s warehouses. It is surrounded by a narrative of workers’ struggles contained in collected union leaflets, stories of mutual solidarity in the age of growing automation, and my attempts to recreate oppressive work procedures.
Most of these elements are connected by a website specially designed by Rytm Digital studio and produced at the Visual Narratives Laboratory at the Łódź Film School. Amzn.vnlab.org is thus a kind of interactive warehouse containing not only artworks, but also articles, excerpts or quotations, becoming both a separate whole and a supplement to exhibitions in art galleries.
Tytus Szabelski – photographer and visual artist, born in 1991. Graduated Journalism and Social Communication at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, and photography at the University of Art in Poznań, where he conducts his doctoral studies. He worked with Center of Contemporary Art in Toruń, Miłość Gallery in Toruń and Krytyka Polityczna magazine. Awarded with scholarship of the city of Toruń in culture (2012 and 2016). Finalist of Polish and international contests for best art master’s diploma work (e.g. The Esteemed Graduates of Polish Academies of Fine Arts 2016 in Gdańsk, Poland, and StartPoint Prize 2016 in Prague, Czech Republic). Laureate of Konrad Pustoła memory scholarship for socially engaged photographer (2017), participant of Parallel – European Photo Based Platform, program dedicated to young photographers and curators (2019–2020). Former editor of Magenta, online magazine dedicated to contemporary photography, now editor of Postmedium art academic journal.
