Tracing the infrastructure of trucking and transport, the project is an examination and meditation on the truck and the trucker as a slippery signifier. Oscillating between the pure functionality of the movement of goods and the poetics of being on the road, trucking generates an array of mythologies that in turn are tied to concrete policies regarding trade. The project attempts to playfully represent this spectrum through videos and drawings installed at FIT, Berlin, a project space housed in an old petrol station.
The project has already taken place in Los Angeles and Tijuana. And as their collective website, Errant Bodies explains the project further:
Based on the networks and infrastructures of trucking and roadways, Active_Trucking maps and notates idiosyncratic aspects of this system. Acquiring information from a variety of sources including trucking companies, notes from excursions on the road and interviews with truckers in the Los Angeles area Active_Trucking seeks to present narratives about the existing system and structure of trucking in the United States and give form to these infrastructural expressions as both economical and alchemical. We are particularly interested in the movements and intersections that occur on the roads of the US both as material embodiments of trade policies, that is, as an example of the constantly negotiated abstract dynamics of transport and markets that have significant local impact, and the mythic fantasies of the open road and the desire for freedom. In the spaces of the highway, we imagine narratives of "Free Trade" intersecting with Easy Rider: multiple narratives that mark the road both as a site for cultural mores and economic activity. The labor of the trucker, the mechanics of trucks, and the workings of dispatchers and related transport companies, feature as efficient systems always on the edge of disruption, distraction, and delay according to the complications of laboring bodies fixated on the roadway.
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