Cyclical Crossings: Easternised Planetary Futures

• In Event: China, Technology, Planetary Futures: Lessons for a World in Crisis? 2) BRI, Infrastructure, Environment

Abstract

Amongst the central tenets of capital flow in our contemporary age is that materials — raw, commodity, consumable — are much more “free” than are people. If we characterise freedom in part through the ability to move around, it is apparent that “free trade” means it is easier for a Walmart T-shirt made in China to move across borders than it is for the human labourers who made it to do the same. This is all explicitly enabled by infrastructures like the Belt and Road Initiative, a global development philosophy and infrastructure project being undertaken by the Chinese government, which involves development investments in 152 countries.
Malta was the first European member state to sign a Belt & Road Memorandum of Understanding with China, precipitated by geography and congealing Malta’s growing trade relationships with Ghana, and its North African and Eastern Mediterranean neighbors of Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Greece, Cyprus, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey (all now in the Belt & Road club). Malta is well positioned as a gateway to the Mashreq and Maghreb countries around the Mediterranean and into Africa, where potential CDM opportunities exist.
Research and discussion for this presentation centres on the effects that such migrations of materials will have on the migration of bodies (human and otherwise), and vice versa, from forensic data, field visits, and investigative tracing, visualization and cycles of storytelling undertaken in June 2020 on Maltese archipelago, in relation to globalising initiatives like the Belt and Road.

Author

• Jamie Allen, Critical Media Lab