Tropical Breeze

In the work Tropical Breeze, lemon-scented moist tissues of the fictive brand Tropical Breeze, are being produced in a short assembly line made up of only two women. In the back of a truck, a woman seated on an exercise bike picks up a dry tissue with her toes, attaches it to a primitive pulley mechanism with a gum she is chewing, and transports the tissue towards the front of the truck. Here the driver, a heavily-perspiring muscular woman, wipes sweat from her forehead onto the same tissue, and returns it to be packaged and branded. Surrounded by stacks of large boxes carrying the Tropical Breeze logo, the two women together engage in producing and delivering a product.

The excess of this production spills into the gallery space itself, where boxes of tissues are stacked high against the walls, and a wooden replica of an emptied shipping container serves as a viewing room for the film itself. The small assembly line shown in this film requires both women to multitask: driving, cycling, packing, delivering, as well as producing. Intimate ingredients such as their sweat and saliva go directly into the product. Their immediate surroundings – the breeze caused by the vehicle in motion and the Lemon Rush drink consumed by both workers – appear essential for the end product. We encounter on-screen pop-up ads as the truck moves along. In the artificial setup constructed in this film, production has become as fantastical as advertising, and the elaborate systems of making, moving, packing and distributing that constitute global commercial trading are both satirized and reflected upon.

Tessa Praun, Curator, January 2013