speak robert

Speak Robert is a participatory multimedia project displayed as two site-specific installations at Tate Exchange and the 57th Venice Biennale.  

Speak Robert focuses on The East India Corporation and the history of tea manufacturing in Britain, in tandem with the EIC’s recent resurrection as a luxury tea brand. Robert Fortune was the Victorian botanist employed by the original EIC to obtain the secret of tea manufacturing in a mission of industrial espionage: he succeeded and what followed was the great ‘British’ tea industry in India.  

In this project Robert becomes a global brand, even a language by proxy, with which two Chinese female performers self-identify in an hyperbolic absurdist sense. 

Engaging with historical research Speak Robert teases out questions about identity in a playful, 'pedagogical' and performative way. The underpinning conditions of global capital lay with the birth of the first corporations and continue with the current mode of global marketing and branding that in turn impact on the play of identities.  

One installation addresses the politics of global languages through an instructional language video in Chinese, the second emphasises historical and contemporary correlations between East and West global marketing through the history of tea and of blockbuster filmmaking via Robert Fortune and Matt Damon (The Wall of China). 

Read about the project in Open Democracy in a interview with sociologist Sara de Jong: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/re-birth-of-east-india-company-global-market-of-identities/