2013
24 × 36 in. open
Single sheet, map-folded
Duplex inkjet printing on French Dur-O-Tone

Named for the year coffee made it to the New World, 1668 examines commodification of labor. The interior spread juxtaposes ledgers from coffee auctions with ledgers from slave auctions. On the reverse, historic depictions of enslaved coffee growers are conflated with imagery of coffee laborers from contemporary advertising. This temporal interplay continues in the text, which presents two heavily romanticized descriptions of coffee country — one from contemporary ad copy and one from a nineteenth-century European traveler.

Elements from coffee technical manuals carry on the rigid organization that characterizes the interior composition. This aesthetic of opaque objectivity and control that once abstracted the institutionalized disgrace of slavery persists today to obfuscate the commodity chain by which coffee comes to the global north. The global aspect of this chain is further referenced by the piece’s structure, which is scaled and folded like a map.