You Can't Automate Me
Katarina Jazbec
15.11.2025–18.1.2026
In a time when automation and artificial intelligence are rapidly transforming the fabric of human labor, You Can’t Automate Me offers a rare and urgent portrait of the embodied knowledge and emotional resilience of industrial workers at the very edge of visibility. Shot at Maasvlakte, the vast, man-made extension of Rotterdam’s harbor—Europe’s largest seaport—the film centers on the lashers: a nearly invisible group of port workers tasked with securing containers using heavy metal bars before ships set sail. They operate within a hyper-automated environment of driverless vehicles and remote-controlled cranes, doing physically intense and dangerous labor in a world increasingly optimized to erase the human.
In many ways, this film speaks directly to global and local concerns. Bergen, as a coastal city with maritime and industrial ties, is no stranger to the shifting landscape of port labor, nor to the deeper socio-economic implications of technological transformation. At Kunsthall 3,14, where we continually examine the tensions between the human and the post-human, the local and the global, Jazbec's film becomes a vital site of inquiry. How does one preserve the dignity of labor when the body is increasingly rendered redundant? What is lost when human presence is no longer deemed efficient?
You Can’t Automate Me is not a traditional documentary. It unfolds as a poetic, experimental meditation on the interdependence between body, machine, and the natural world. Lashers emerge not only as workers but as narrators of a slow, embodied resistance—through movement, memory, and ritual. Jazbec weaves their stories with surreal sequences, CGI-animated stowaway animals, and choreography derived from labor gestures, expanding the film beyond reportage into a rich sensorial and spiritual register. At times, the workers’ routines slip into dreamscapes, where container ships become spectral presences, and harbor machinery hums with an uncanny life of its own.
The presence of stowaway animals—those accidental passengers who traverse continents hidden within cargo—introduces a parallel, often overlooked narrative. These animals, both real and rendered in digital animation, function as quiet messengers from the natural world, slipping through the cracks of global logistics. Their presence signals the porousness of even the most controlled environments. They resist categorization, existing in liminal space: neither cargo nor crew, neither wanted nor entirely unwelcome. In Jazbec’s hands, they become symbolic disruptors, reminding us that despite the illusion of complete automation and control, the non-human world continues to move, adapt, and appear—uninvited but not without significance.
The concept of parallel spaces is central to the film’s architecture. Jazbec constructs a multi-layered narrative where different realities—economic, emotional, spiritual, animal—co-exist and collide. These spaces are not merely metaphorical; they are deeply material and experiential. The lashers live within the industrial choreography of time-sensitive shipping logistics, but also within a psychological and bodily reality shaped by exhaustion, grief, camaraderie, and pride. Their gestures, when recontextualized as movement scores, uncover a hidden language of labor—one that speaks through the repetition of effort, the syncopation of muscle memory, and the choreography of survival. Alongside this, the presence of the animals, the spiritual voice of the narrator (the container cleaner), and the ambient rhythms of the port open other layers: temporalities outside capitalist efficiency, spaces of memory, and zones of sensing that resist datafication.
Within this framework, automation is not simply a technical development—it becomes a regime. As AI systems and automated infrastructures increasingly mediate how work is organized, performed, and valued, human labor is reconfigured around the logics of productivity and control. The lashers are among the last port workers doing physically demanding tasks in a setting otherwise dominated by intelligent machines. Their marginal position is not incidental; it reflects a broader shift in which entire classes of embodied labor are deemed obsolete, while new forms of “invisible labor” proliferate under the guise of efficiency.
For Jazbec, the lashers’ presence is not only physical—it is political, philosophical, and profoundly human. Their acute responsiveness to their environment emerges not from choice but from necessity: in their dangerous line of work, failure to remain attuned to one’s surroundings can be fatal. This sensory attentiveness, this daily act of response, stands in stark contrast to the passive drift encouraged by algorithmic life, where curated feeds and automated suggestions shape our reactions before we even register them. In this light, the film becomes a meditation on what the artist calls “our human and non-human agency amid a highly automated and controlled environment.” Referencing Donna Haraway’s concept of response-ability from the book Staying with the Trouble, Jazbec aligns this attentiveness with an ethic of care and co-constitution. For Haraway, response-ability is not merely about individual agency, but about cultivating the capacity to stay with complexity—to remain implicated, entangled, and accountable within multispecies worlds. It is a form of responsibility that resists detachment, insisting instead on relational awareness and ongoing negotiation. The lashers, through their embodied awareness, model a form of radical presence that resists the seductions of detachment and abstraction.
In this sense, You Can’t Automate Me is not nostalgic—it is critical. It does not seek to romanticize manual labor, but rather to expose the cost of its erasure. As AI technologies increasingly make decisions that impact workers’ lives—monitoring productivity, allocating shifts, or rendering roles unnecessary—the human body becomes both hyper-visible (as data) and socially invisible (as a subject). Jazbec’s film insists on restoring this visibility. It asks what kind of knowledge is being lost in the transition to automation, and what new forms of alienation are emerging in its wake.
The film’s methodology—grounded in deep listening, embodied research, and collective engagement—aligns with Kunsthall 3,14’s broader curatorial interest in art as a means to unpack systemic structures and create shared spaces for reflection. Jazbec's work refuses simplification. Instead, it invites audiences into a slow, layered experience that foregrounds complexity, intimacy, and co-existence.
Ultimately, You Can’t Automate Me gestures toward a more expansive understanding of what labor is, and what it could be. By centering those who remain on the margins of industrial automation, and by allowing animals, landscapes, and movement itself to speak, the film opens a space to imagine other economies—of care, of attentiveness, of response-ability—where life, in all its forms, resists being reduced to function.
Curated by Malin Barth