Anatomy of a Delivery

The simple tap on the screen of your smartphone, the notification of the order withdrawn by the rider and finally the delivery. A process that is now familiar to those who live in cities and that the pandemic has institutionalized but which hides a series of data movements, algorithms and human beings that are slowly changing many aspects - aesthetic and cultural - of contemporary society. The short "Riders not Heroes: Anatomy of a Delivery" - by the interdisciplinary study 2050+ in collaboration with -orama - dissects the multiple realities that collide throughout the duration of a food delivery: a complex system where bodily, chemical, and synthetic regimes are entangled in a short time frame, collapsing the acts of ordering and delivering. Two apparently frictionless gestures mark the extremes of a hidden anatomy, mirrored in the social separation and yet shared condition between customers and riders. Both are precarious, exhausted bodies. Both are cogs in the greater delivery industry. 

 The documentary is the second episode of the "Riders Not Heroes" series which aims to analyze social changes across the food delivery sector. In an interview with nss magazine on the occasion of the digital cover dedicated to the city of Milan, 2050+ had underlined "the gradual loss of the possibility of relating to the unexpected, to the unknown. For some months now, there have been fewer opportunities and less space for improvisation and for random encounters. If "social distancing" seems inevitable for our post-pandemic condition, safe spaces that allow "social rapprochement" remain crucial. "The pandemic has changed the consumer perception with food delivery, it has become one of the few links with pleasure, with a little luxury to escape the routine, it was an act that brought with it a thread of risk and transgression. This new narrative has buried many of the problematic aspects of the sector (such as the taxes not paid by the platforms and the rights of the riders) which however remain dormant in the practical act of delivery, when the process passes from to The algorithms for the physical encounter between two actors who occupy different spaces and functions in society and yet contribute - like gears - to the same great mechanism.

The short film, together with the opening episode Riders Not Heroes, is currently on view at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) as part of the exhibition A Section of Now, on view through 1 May 2022.