Tourist Factory by Shandi YiCheng Hsin is a performative installation that gives you a mediated insight in the labouring issues of the capitalist society.

Probiotics are essential for the food industry. From the making of bread to the fermentation of wine, all the fermented food products require the help of these bacterias. Like silence labours of our capitalist society, probiotics become the ‘animal laborans’ who live for labouring and labour for survival.

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Project ‘Tourist Factory’ focuses on the consuming and labouring issues of the capitalist society, aims to simulate the notion of ‘the mass-produced factory’ into an performative installation as a metaphor for the relationship between employer and employee. Within this work the artist, in the role of as a manufacturer, provides a functioning factory in the form of a workable environment for the scoby to ‘work’ fermenting the black tea into Kombucha. The work combines the lighting installation with the tour guide voice by Google Translate to introduce the Kombucha producing process in English, Mandarin and Spanish, which are the three languages that is the most commonly use in the global manufacturing industry. By making you spectator of this process you inevitably become the most important part of the consuming system, the ‘tourists’ in Project ‘Tourist Factory’.