A video work that explores the labyrinthine world-within-a-world of African migrant traders working in the export markets of Guangzhou – the new capital of South-South trade, and the nexus of emergent 21st Century global capitalism.

A new kind of capitalism is emerging from this fertile South-South trade. This landscape is not shaped by the large-scale deals of multinational corporations but by the ‘low-end globalisation’ of small-scale traders. Doing business in cash, transporting goods in shipping containers or carry-on luggage, traders from Africa exploit their interstitial advantages to profit from a system from which typically excludes them.

GZ Calling (2017) approaches this tangled China-Africa relationship from the embedded perspective of a private investigator surveilling the export markets of Guangzhou. The 3-channel video installation envisages a world in which the supply and demand of counterfeit goods has grown to rival Western brand-name capitalism. Through the narrator’s eyes these vast wholesale malls are a bewildering space of cultural collision and exchange, of copies and fakes, dreams and paranoia. Based on interviews with investigators and lawyers working on the front line of anti- counterfeiting in China today, GZ Calling (2017) is the first iteration of the film and research project, The Qilin.

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Supported by: Film- Und Medien Stiftung NRW, British Councilfull project