Cargo X

A documentary truck ride by Rimini Protokoll (Kaegi/Karrenbauer)

Rimini Protokoll has transformed a truck into a theatre – the seating installed in the trailer takes 50 spectators on a journey to the places of transit and trade at the city’s edges. 

Two truckdrivers tell their stories while they drive. They have their first names written directly under the windscreen; they are sitting 2 meters above street-level and have 500 hp under their right foot. They have seen many countries but they know cities only from traffic signs. Regional differences for them boil down to the fast food restaurants by the roadside toilets. They are the nomads of cargo transport: they work and live on less than 6 mobile square meters in front of their 40-ton freight. 

For local versions different truckdrivers are casted and bring different stories about their own migration and the migration of goods. Their stories turn the trip into a real-space-roadmovie.

The truck is converted in such a way that 50 people can look through a 10m long window to see the landscape passing by. Where goods used to be stacked in the past, now the audience is sitting and looking from a changed perspective back at their city. Thus the truck serves as an observatory, a mobile binocular trained at the city like a microscope. The audience is transported for two hours along gaz-stations, industrial loading ramps and other hotspots of globalisation, which are live synced with a score composed for the landscape outside the window. On the road cordless microphones will transmit the truck drivers biographies live into the truck. Cargo Congo-Lausanne is a site-specific performance along the suburbs of west Lausanne and feels like a road movie through the flipside of a globalised economy.  

 

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