The Phone Talks Back: A monologue on Shenzhen & the architectures of consumer technologies
Text by Ruba Al-Sweel The following monologue is excerpted from ‘Plastic Pilgrims’ (2025), a film by Ruba Al-Sweel, which is written from the perspective of a stolen and resold phone. The monologue narrates the phone’s journey from Shenzhen (colloquially mythologised as the world’s graveyard for stolen iPhones and electronics) and, through this, gradually unfolds questions […]