Trade/Trace/Transit

Trade/Trace/Transit (Tintin Wulia since 2014) is a mobile ethnography of cardboard waste and simultaneously a series of public interventions into the trade route of cardboard waste in Hong Kong.

This project is initially supported by the Australia Council for the Arts’ New Work – Mid Career grant (2014-6).

b a c k g r o u n d

Cardboard boxes live long after they are disposed. In many places around the world including Hong Kong, they travel from hand to hand during this long life, changing shape and intersecting varied lives. Along routes in Hong Kong, they are sold by waste collectors via the recycling collection points to the port. Their lifetime reaches its end at paper mills in China.

Around Central, Hong Kong, this cardboard route is extraordinary. Filipino domestic workers gather in Central for their day off, and re-use the cardboard waste to build temporary ‘houses’. In this decades-old tradition, I discovered how a complex informal economy is born. The monetary value of the cardboard waste is multiplied through covert, hand-to-hand transactions, where intricate trade and trade-offs between cardboard waste collectors, suppliers, distributors, consumers, the hawkers police and passersby take place.

Throughout this trade and trade-offs, the cyclical re-collecting and re-selling amplifies the social meaning of the “waste”. The waste becomes inhabited by the lived experiences of the agents of its journey, who contribute their various circumstances. Artefacts of these lived experiences are then amassed and compressed at the recycling collection points. Every day of the week, they are trucked along the Hong Kong island’s northern coastal area to the transit port, to be shipped to China.