Cargo Cults Unlimited exhibition at Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel

Cargo for Cargo: a flawless LTypI, spotted by Edgar Walthert in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

This year, the local Museum of Ethnography (MEN) presents an exhibition titled Cargo Cults Unlimited. From the museum’s website:

Cargo Cults Unlimited explores the complex theme of the globalized economy. Highly material, to the point of threatening to exhaust the earth’s resources, the economy is also composed of ethereal abstractions, prophetic discourses, mimetic behavior and bureaucratic protocols. The exhibition invites visitors to explore this complexity by drawing on images associated with the notion of the “cargo cult”.

The term refers to a set of millenarian rituals that appeared in Melanesia with colonization in the 19th century. Guided by charismatic leaders, followers imitate selected forms of Western behavior – arranging cut flowers, conducting military parades or constructing bamboo harbors and airstrips – with the apparent aim of capturing the wealth produced overseas and imported by boat or plane. As anthropologists have shown, the popularity of this term testifies above all to the ethnocentrism and paternalism of the colonizers faced with practices they deemed naïve or irrational.

Reversing the perspective, the exhibition questions whether the magical thinking once attributed to distant savages might not better characterize contemporary relationships with the globalized economy. Do we not find echoes of cargo cults in the fetishization of brands and external signs of wealth? In the more-or-less deliberate ignorance of the places and conditions under which clothes, food and electronics are produced? In the mimetic behavior observed on financial markets? In faith in a caste of experts who speak on behalf of supernatural entities known as growth or the market?

Gavillet & Rust’s Cargo (Optimo, 2003) is used on the exhibition poster, together with Chi-Long Trieu’s Basel Grotesk and Ian Party’s Antarctica. It also appears inside the exhibition, alongside other fonts. Cargo Cults Unlimited was designed by Curious Space. The scenography is by Anna Jones, Elfyn Round, and Raphaël von Allmen. Graziella Paiano worked on the graphics.