Fordland takes its starting point from a collection of Ford Motor Company advertisements archived in Detroit where the company has long been based. The advertisements, beginning from the 1920s, position the latest Ford cars against the backdrop of various American landscapes. When viewed collectively these advertisements reveal how an instrumentalised landscape has been crucial in supporting consumer culture and promoting the aspirational ‘American Dream’.
Danielle Dean has deconstructed and reproduced the original source materials in order to remove the car and place the viewer in the passenger seat. However, rather than moving through the scenes of beauty and abundance as depicted in the original adverts, the artist presents the audience with an alternative perspective that highlights the human labour and environmental cost that enables a capitalist enterprise.
In this artwork Danielle foregrounds two locations; The Service Building and Fordlandia and Fordlândia in Brazil, both designed by Ford’s architect, Albert Kahn. The Service Building housed the Ford Motor Company's Detroit branch operations, while Fordlandia was 10,000 square kilometres of Brazilian Amazon rainforest flattened for the production of rubber required for car tires.
In Dean’s animation, elements of these two locations appear in front of a rolling backdrop of landscapes created by Ford for advertisements between 1931 and 1955. The landscapes transform and blend into each other as the piece unfolds, only interrupted by a seemingly decaying forest of columns. The Amazonian landscape was eventually key to the destruction of the Fordlandia settlement. The sheer environmental pressure, particularly from insect infestations, as well as regular worker strikes, destroyed the rubber production line.
Dean’s animation fuses together architectural features of The Service Building and Fordlandia, depicting the marble columns of the building in Detroit weeping rubber sap. Accompanied by the sounds of insects indigenous to Fordlandia, The Service Building is now itself subject to the modes of production and extraction utilised by the automobile industry.
By drawing on the technique of original hand-painted adverts, the artist uses the advertising industry’s own method of visual communications to expose the exploitation of the landscape firstly to create cars, and secondly to sell them.
Central to Dean’s formal investigation is the use of a technique called multi-plane animation effect, whereby the different elements of a perspective image are separated into successive layers, crafting an illusion of three-dimensionality, immersion, and perspectival depth or parallax. This technique, extensively mechanised by Walt Disney in the 1930s by re-purposing automobile parts into a multi-plane camera, was a crucial aspect of the industrialization of advertising and the intensification of the technical division of labour in the production of capitalist imaginaries. As Dean explains, “Disney effectively turned the multi-plane camera into a Fordist assembly line for the production of subjectivity”.
Animation: Amie Nowlan and Gary Dumbill
Illustrations: Marceline Mason and Tida Whitney Lek
Sound: Cruce Grammatico and Dominic Coppla
This video contains a soundscape only and does not have subtitles.
