Joshua Mutton | Talking about his work (Slaves) displayed in The ‘POWER’ exhibition
27,000,000 people What does that number look like? How can we even begin to imagine? That is more people than we will meet in our lifetime, if we all lived to 90 years old estimates say that we will roughly only meet 100,000 people and that is generous estimate. Times 100,000 by 270 then you get 27,000,000. 27,000,000 over half of the English population 27,000,000 Thats the number of people enslaved today.
The very nature of slavery is about a struggle against power, a battleground. The distribution of power amongst people is extremely unequal, the few have power over many. Slavery is a clear representation of this inequality, the injustice is only accentuated when viewing the sheer scale of slavery.
Its is often considered a thing of the past, but the harsh reality is that there are more slaves today than there has ever been. I witnessed the effects of this modern day slavery when I lived in Uganda for six months people knew others who were enslaved and were in constant fear. Slavery is something that as humans we should combat. Unfortunately the subject is often swept under the rug, the media aren't broadcasting slavery as a news story and we aren't taught about it in school. But the threat is there, its a real thing.
I wanted to expose slavery for what it is, to raise awareness of this hidden crime. I have been working on this theme for a year now and every piece I produce has one goal and thats to show people that slavery is all around us.
This piece simply titled slaves, is a compilation of concepts from my previous works. It displays the number of slaves in the 50 most powerful countries in the world. With the theme of power as this exhibitions focus I decided that it would be really interesting to find out which countries held the most power. I thought the best way to do this was to use Google. I simply typed ’50 most powerful countries’ and list upon list were displayed. All of these list were about the economy and GDP, is power really just how much money you have? Or is it much more than that?
Using art as a medium to portray a social injustice is no new concept, I was inspired by many artists such as Barbara Kruger and the collaborative group justseeds. Both of whom target an issue that people are too scared or uneducated to voice and they expose the world in a broken and chaotic state.
The figures that are represented here are the estimated by the UN and it is scarily likely to actually be a larger number than these. I faced several obstacles within this project, how exactly to communicate these figures and still have an emotive yet factual response. The process leading up to this work involved several different explorations of presenting figures in an artistic manner. I needed to find a way that connected and meant something. This work here is not finished, its an on-going piece of work, I want to add more countries and update the figures as the number of enslaved people is still on the rise.
The facts are all here, we all know that its going on, but why is it still happening? Big companies such as Nike and Apple have been accused of using slaves to manufacture their goods, yet for some reason these global franchises are above the law. Is money really power? No. The consumer has the power, if we as consumers are educated and understand the repercussions of forced labor we can start to create change.
Simple things have already made a huge difference for example, in 2008 a Cadbury consumer wrote a letter to Cadbury and asked them about their fair-trade policies. At the time cadbury was using farmers in extremely poor conditions and a petition was started to make Cadbury fair-trade, a year later in 2009 Cadbury announced that their chocolate was going to be 100% fair-trade. The consumer had the power.
This wrestling over power is something that is extremely common in every area of western society, capitalism and communism both extreme in their views deal with power within their main policies. Although power is a lucrative matter, it is something that we are all entitled to.
