Missed the boat II

Early on the morning of Saturday 14th December 2002 the Tricolor, a cargo vessel the size of two football pitches, sank in dense fog after being rammed from behind by another ship, the Kariba...no one was hurt. The Kariba managed to limp back to port with a smashed hull as the Tricolor lay in the Channel with its submerged cargo of 2,862 luxury cars and 77 machinery parts. The sinking of the Tricolor was not a disaster but in the representation of this incident in local, national and international news reports two discursive elements collided, that of the technological accident and the commodity. Historically this combination has long held our fascination, demonstrable from the earliest novels to contemporary films. Missed the boat II uses this and subsequent events as way to re- investigate the symbolic intersection of these two aspects, both of which figure heavily, albeit separately, in our post-industrial age. The original presentation of this accident had a certain currency, not least in terms of its momentous scale, but as the work unravels the accounts surrounding this scenario its significance is brought into question. Indeed the reported events take on a more farcical tone as the work explores the impossibility of representing the accident in its repeated form – the accident in repetition. This work has been exhibited at Dagmar De Pooter Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium and Linnagalerii, Tallinn, Estonia.