Introduction

Modelled Recycled Systems is a longue durée artistic and research project recording ship-breaking, its material waste ecologies and associated labour practices (and ramifications) as relates to global shipping accountability. The project comprises a series of sub-topics and investigations that have been carried out (and will continue) to engage the disjunct between various shipping industries that perpetuate the often invisible flow of capital across our oceans and seas. This invisible flow congeals and unofficially organises itself into the formation of ‘waste capital’ at remote spatial geographies in the South Asian subcontinent; particularly and increasingly in newer sites across the globe and historically in a few now-defunct sites.

The works showcase research interests being explored in order to better understand patterns within this global shipping trade vis-a-vis changing scale of ships that are subsequently dismantled at the yards. This is to start a conversation centered on not just current, but past global accountability with regards to ship-breaking. I travelled to the Alang-Sosiya yard over the years in different capacities. Tracing the path of recycled parts from decommissioned ships allows one to follow their machinic life into new industries, technologies, and their associated labour practices.

Shipbreak

From the start of the life-cycle, i.e. the shipbuilding process; the shipping industry has had a convenient tendency of dissociating itself from the act of shipbreaking and relegate it to another industry – namely the waste/ recycling industry. The ‘legitimate’ shipping industry distances itself from this very specific and ‘other’ circular economy comprising specific regions, where disassembly is still a profitable endeavour. This refusal to acknowledge end-of-life ships as part of the make-to-break trajectory, has led to the industry migrating to urban peripheral spaces overlooking safe labour laws and sometimes flouting basic environmental rules. This invisibility that the shipping industry enjoys allows loopholes within which the informality of breaking continues to occur. 

Ship-breaking yards of this nature have inherent issues with representation surrounding the precarity of labour practices, environmental degradation, industrial legalities and /or its representation. This visual representation while being well meaning, tends to orientalise conditions of squalor and hardship.

The image of these yards over the years has taken on a fascination for what it encapsulates; a sort of apocalyptic vision of the breakdown of not just the vessel but capital at work. Hence, this striking and often romanticised, brutal aesthetic is consumed in the way that allows the culpability to remain firmly where the ships end up; rather than concentrating on including practices that transpired during its active life-span as well. I implicate this photo I took [above] as an example of this critique. This is of course not true of all situations/ projects but photographs were rare and documentation scant, so the shortage of information added to the curiosity and allure of this type of visual iconography. This happened especially in the 1980s/ 90s when these yards were organised unofficially at remote and fairly inaccessible spatial geographies that were deemed mysterious and ’interesting’. It lays the blame of the vessel condition and site condition mainly in the scope of an environmental degradation and labour-extractive lens, consumed mainly through a specific type of imagery. Post 2000, with worldwide image sharing platforms like Google etc. taking hold; it has allowed shipbreaking as an image to be widely disseminated.

Modelled Recycled Systems

The project involves mapping the infrastructural set-up of the yard and the waste-ecologies via recycled paths of the ships as a starting point. In other words – my original mandate was to map each and every part of a ship from the point that it’s decommissioned, broken down and recycled, by tracing the often unconventional trajectories it follows during this process. This entails modelling their often (odd) path back into primary (raw material), secondary (back into other ships) or tertiary (on land) markets. Thereafter the research addresses ship-breaking through various modes of practice and documenting lesser talked about issues concerning the business of breaking, peripheral shipping industries, labour issues, middle management, government policies regarding breaking and associated/engaged govt. organisations and miscellaneous businesses. The various government portfolios that overlap of the site – labour, pollution, health, environment, coastal, steel etc. lead to a very complicated ownership and leasing scenario at the yards that is part state-run and part private. 

A series of multi-media works with varied outputs have emerged from this study so far, such as ‘Sounding out the labour archive’, ‘In The Wake Of Shipping Infrastructure’, ‘[shipbreak_dossier]’, ‘in[fra]structional’, and ‘Whale Wars’ to engage unseen registers within the shipping industry as opposed to default visual (and otherwise written) iconography being the dominant narrative of recording the ongoings of the yards. This is undertaken primarily as an impulse to demystify these conditions at site while linking them to invisible infrastructures that govern the shipping industry.

An example of this is ‘Sounding out the labour archive’ that engages mainly a sonic documentation at the yard site to offer alternate ways to engage labour conditions at the yard among other happenings. Simultaneously, the works made towards, ‘In The Wake Of Shipping Infrastructure‘, conceptualised instances of a personal shipping history [my father was a Ship captain active from 1950s -2000] to engage with shipping infrastructural set-ups in the last 7 decades, as it affected the size of ships being broken subsequently. The recent suite of works ‘[shipbreak_dossier]’ is a series on ship-breaking which are an early attempt to understand different scales of operations based on research conducted for the past decade at the ship-breaking yards of Mumbai and Alang-Sosiya. ‘in[fra]structional’ and ‘Whale Wars’ are speculative takes on the conflict and overlap of oceanic infrastructures with the life-forms that inhabit and influence it. ‘in[fra]structional’ started out as a conceptual repository of different shipping technologies, ideas, diagrams, material speculation and shapes, as well as a space to store outdated but still useful shipping technologies. 

[shipbreak_dossier]

[shipbreak_dossier] (2009 – ongoing) is a suite of works aimed at connecting aspects of shipbuilding and the informality of shipbreaking techniques through naval architecture, CAD & marine engineering software to highlight the disjunct between what is considered two separate industries. The drawings are organised into broad categories such as Origins, Conditions, Stasis etc. that attempt to diagram nuanced and often overlooked data during the breaking process.

Kalvari Class: Origins

Kalvari Class was the first of three Foxtrot class naval submarines procured by the Indian Navy in 1962. It was a diesel-electric submarine and the prominent snout was shaped after a beluga whale. Whales are also the primary design influence for submarines in general, and beaching is something that happens to whales, not just stricken ships waiting to be taken apart. These grammars come together to produce this speculative image envisioning the yards earliest historical and possibly naval beginnings.

_{Khaddas, Micro tip on architectural tracing paper, 2019
Anchors drag and hook into the soft sea-bed when the movement of a ship is to be restricted. Here, at the shipbreaking yard, the anchor symbolically finds its final resting place at the pit or khadda. Its only function? – to be sorted, weighed and sold; being solid metal will probably fetch it a fair price.}

Khaddas: Origins
The pits or khaddas are where the recycled economy of the vessel (all which are not flattened steel sheets) is sorted, quantified, exchanged, and disposed off. Back in the day when the ships were smaller, tells me a ship-owner, actual pits were dug into the beach to sort and dump various parts in. The entire sorting operation has shifted to the 2 km or so stretch of road that leads to the main entrance of the yard. As you approach the final stretch on either side by road, you start seeing the warehouses, still called khaddas; each catering to a specific part of the dismantled vessel.

Infect_Shoreline [drag]: Conditions

Engaging this information has led to a series of ongoing works called ‘Infect_Shoreline’. These abstract images capture unseen registers within the onsite conditions of the yard space. One of these works, drag [below] imagines the traces left behind as large sections of the disassembled ships are dragged on to the beach, literally combing patterns onto the sand. The flattened rectangular patches, that resemble the metal sheet portions of a broken-down vessel, serve as an abstract alternate representation to the photo-graphic image of the ship.

_{drag / keel / keel over
mixed media, 210 x 297 mm
2019}

_{Infect_Shoreline_I: drag} 

_{– Shoreline – intertidal zone – dragging – sections – flattened sheets}

_{Infect_Shoreline_II: keel 
Infect_Shoreline_III: keel over
keel (L) and keel over (R) pertain to design considerations regarding shipbreaking that exist within the current systems. The keel, on which ships are built, is symbolically inserted here as a means for safe non-polluting ship-breaking, insulating the inter-tidal zone (represented in darker brown) from the ship being dismantled.
keel over overstates the obvious breaking procedure but maps the leakage (literally using the map outline) to the shops along the road that leads to Alang.}

Basic Design – Page 7: Conditions

Published in 1969 by ‘The Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers,’ Ship Design & Construction is an authoritative and standard book for studying shipbuilding and marine engineering principles. On page 7, in an early section discussing ship proportions, the costs to be taken into account while building are presented as an easy-to-read infographic. Although perfectly valid for the era it was published in, when the industry was mainly in an upswing, these estimates do not take into account the costs related to the vessel’s eventual and inevitable breaking down. The placement of the ships in the infographic prompted this image [below] using  page 7 from the book as they resemble ships lined up for dismantling.

Sounding out the Labour Archive

Sounding out the labour archive is a sonic documentation of the ship-breaking yard and is one such early engagement with forms of labour involved in large scale operation of shipbreaking at site. The visual tropes associated with shipbreaking usually miss other scales of engagement with the site. This work seeks to acknowledge and document those other reverberating registers within the shipbreaking industry through an aural landscape. These are the large amounts of ‘data‘ that get left out of the equation due to the nature of the spatial geography we are encountering and how we are recording them. This diagram [below] highlights the cross-section of the organisation of the shipbreaking yard – from the canteen across the road, to the road, the entrance, the manager’s office to the sorting area/ beach down to the winches that hold the ships, to the continental shelf/water’s edge to the vessel itself – all mapped alongside its associated sounds. The heterotopic space induced by these elemental conditions mark a specific moment; where sound records the moment when objects (that were pulled together and fused to form a ship) again begin to come apart to be redistributed.

safe beaching: Conditions

Lighthouses are installed to mark dangerous coastlines, hazardous shoals, reefs and safe entries to harbours; they also assist in aerial navigation. The advent of electronic navigational systems and maintenance has led to their decline. Ironically, the ship-breaking yard at Alang possesses its own lighthouse, not necessarily just for safe harbour of ships in the Gulf, but to also guide them in for safe beaching.

Drydock: Stasis 

The images under this heading aim to document instances of ‘stasis’ and ‘technological stasis’ across shipping histories, processes that survived or are integral to an industry subject to fast-paced, innovation-based technological marine environments. Elements within a system that remain relevant by virtue of simple observations (by asking mariners what matters to them, for example) such as clouds and their patterns, horizons, sea-gulls at the water’s edge, sunsets etc. form a more abstract record of life at sea. Another typology of drawings within this subset is an ongoing repository of technological innovations that have persevered such as lighthouses, nautical charts, and sailor knots etc. 

Though dry-docks have transformed into floating dry-docks, the iron needle used to centre the ship as it comes in to be docked continues to be used; an analog procedure using line-of-sight that remains unchanged despite advancements in marine engineering. Dangling from a rope, the needle, a simple and rudimentary solution, might be a back-up but it is still present in most dry-docks the world over.

Salvage

Is recovering from breaking a form of salvage? Yes and no.

In shipping industry terminology – no, because ‘salvage operations’ or ‘marine salvage’ is conducted for ships to recover the ship and its cargo in case of a marine casualty, while at sea. This terminology permeates through shipping industry accidents, as they are part of the jargon of the ocean, and the inherent invisibility that the shipping industry enjoys is only interrupted in the face of an accident which brings it to our attention. Salvage is the operation that is a race against time, to refloat/ repair/ fix a ship (if visible and in the glare of international scrutiny such as the recent Suez Canal incident of the ship Evergiven) or if invisible and cost-prohibitive, then to be left ‘as is’at the expense of the environment especially if out of reach; e.g. the bottom of the ocean or washing up on our shores, which nowadays has consequences.

The recovery of shipping cargo, the ship itself, and its parts are somehow never looked at in the shipbreaking industry as salvage or recovery, it is merely recycling because it would amount to an acknowledgment by the industry. Here we can suggest recoding salvage as the ship condition that is a casualty to either time or logistics. The cost to run or repair or fulfill logistical capabilities far outweighs its usefulness. The functions performed are more or less the same, just not written off as a ‘bad asset’. These bad assets end up beached on a strip of land armed ironically with a lighthouse to guide them in.

Dust

The raw material break-down of a vessel can be viewed as an ‘elemental disintegration’. The minute the ship is beached, it is no longer viewed as one – from the standpoint of the breaker. The vessel’s specifications will determine the tonnage the steel extracted from it will procure. The age of the ship will be calculated, the general conditions surmised and quality of steel it carries determined.

Losses are minimised; time is of the essence – the rate of steel on the international market will determine the date of breakage. A loss or drop in price is calculated per tonne and will determine the pricing factor; determined by cash buyers, whether profit or loss – perhaps catastrophic, perhaps minimal. It is a delicate yet quick decision, or a deliberate and patient one. 

Shipbreaking yards use oxy-acetylene flames for the purpose of cutting. A jet of pure oxygen raises the temperature causing a sutured cut while the envelope of accompanying elements contain and control it, burning it into a metal oxide. The more polluted the steel, the less clean is the cut. If we view the breakdown of the ships through its extractive quality; where the primary objective is to flatten as much as you can – cut, hammer, hit, mould, break, fashion into flattened sheets (as this is easiest to transport), then an elemental disintegration begins to take hold.

The drag of the ship-sections on the beach (that constantly rake up patterns) unsettles the packed elements the beach tries hard to contain. These may contain alien sound registers, the metal carcasses, the post-capital salvage, the heat from the oxy-acetylene flame used for cutting, the non-biodegradable foam padding used in most ships, the chipped paint, the muddy churn of the continental shelf, hardened pebbles made from emulsified oil and bunker fuel, rust, singing labourers, metal powder corroded with time and salt, slag, temperature and weather sensitive chemical reactions, crushed barnacles, sweat, metal-shavings, petrochemical waste, composites of soot and dirt, some blood.

The resulting uneasy mixture and residue from all these make for a very different kind of dust that blows through this harsh environment; a byproduct of the shipping industry that refuses to acknowledge it after capital has extracted its worth.