Tourist Factory: Rotterdam:

Tourist Factory by Shandi YiCheng Hsin is a performative installation that gives you a mediated insight into the labouring issues of the capitalist society.

Probiotics are essential for the food industry. From the making of bread to the fermentation of wine, all fermented food products require the help of these bacteria. Like silent labourers of our capitalist society, probiotics become the ‘animal labourers’ who live for labouring and labour for survival.

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Project ‘Tourist Factory’ focuses on the consuming and labouring issues of the capitalist society, and aims to simulate the notion of ‘the mass-produced factory’ into a performative installation as a metaphor for the relationship between employer and employee. Within this work, the artist, in the role of a manufacturer, provides a functioning factory in the form of a workable environment for the SCOBY to ‘work’ fermenting the black tea into Kombucha. The work combines the lighting installation with the tour guide's voice through Google Translate to introduce the production process in English, Mandarin and Spanish, which are the three languages that are the most commonly used in the global manufacturing industry. By making you a spectator of this process you inevitably become the most important part of the consuming system, the ‘tourists’ in Project ‘Tourist Factory’.