TOFUD # Trolley 0504

As long as trade moves

WanHua is the oldest district in Taipei. The local, informal and sometimes a bit rough but charming character makes it perfect for my ongoing urban research project on the use of space.

On the streets of Taipei, I notice small electric trolleys used as the basic tools of market traders. These trolleys are an essential part of the urban trading and transportation system. Allowed in a limited radius around the covered market halls, the trolleys are legal, but for me it becomes interesting when they are tolerated beyond this restriction.  The markets and traders are so important in distributing food in the city that this parallel layer of anarchic acts is tolerated blindly. Like the Chinese BangBang, they constitute an important alternative practical layer in the city.

During the period between my first and second stay in Taiwan, I created a project plan using the trolley as a basis. On the back of the trolley, I design an installation based on the original floor plan of Fort Zeelandia in Tainan. It is not a literal echo of the former fort, but an autonomous reinterpretation; a reference to the unscrupulous ideology of world trade turning into politics. The market trolley and the distorted fort together form a unity that contrasts with the daily reality of fruits and vegetables, of people buying and selling in the markets.

The reactions he expected while driving around: conversations, anger, mirth, curses remain absent. It is seen, even though there is sometimes physical contact in the crowded markets, but any reaction is avoided. The trolley is recognizable from the neighborhood, but the cargo is so strange that it is better not to react to it, is my interpretation.

Small trade is a beautiful and essential survival mechanism; world trade is a power system. A question that comes to my mind is whether this is how it happened in the seventeenth century: a strange ship docks and builds something unknown, it turns out to be a fortification, and then a few years later it is dictated to you from this place what you should do and how you should think. Extended to the present day; can you ignore an unknown element?