We barely even see them, because they’re everywhere. Piled next to rural mailboxes, precariously left on porches, taking up space in the delivery truck blocking your road. Cardboard boxes — specifically, shipping boxes — have become a ubiquitous part of daily life. Yet before they get to you, these humble containers experience epic adventures.
Artists Johannes Bellinkx and Daan Brinkmann, both of whom live and work in Amsterdam, invite viewers to place themselves inside the box, in a sense, with “The Parcel Project” at the Amy E. Tarrant Gallery at the Flynn in Burlington.
Visitors take a seat on a central wooden bench in the gallery. Through videos on four wall-size screens arranged around them in a square, they then participate in a package’s journey, from a shipping store all the way to delivery.
“You kind of shrink yourself down and then get mailed,” Jay Wahl, the Flynn’s executive director, said of the installation.
As you travel over conveyor belts and onto trucks, get locked into holding cages and processed through vast warehouses, haptic speakers inside the bench rumble and thump, offering not just a visual experience to match the parcel’s but a full sensory one. You learn how it feels to be shuffled along, left for a while, summarily tossed in a new pile. As you climb belts and slide down chutes, sometimes in darkness, it’s like riding a roller coaster.
The piece came to the Flynn through the In Situ network, a European platform that commissions art in public spaces; the Flynn is its only North American partner. Though the piece originated in Europe, Wahl said, almost all the footage for this version was filmed in the U.S.; the artists plan to travel the globe with the project, with an African journey currently in the works.
To create the piece, the artists engineered a box that looks like a normal package but is filled with cameras and sensors that record from its different faces. Then, Wahl said, “They gave us the box and said, ‘Ship it around, and we’ll see what happens.’”
The box went all over Vermont and the East Coast, collecting footage through different kinds of facilities. Though workers’ faces are blurred out, you hear them chatting, singing, going about their day. The footage offers a balance of mysterious, byzantine processing facilities and simple rural postal routes, which sometimes surround the viewer with identical views, then split into different perspectives. “Some of the shots still surprise me, because there’s nobody managing the camera,” Wahl said. “The artists think about this almost as found footage.”
Though the subject might seem to lend itself to a critique of capitalism, or to an examination of shipping as a political space of tariffs and borders, the installation doesn’t read that way. It’s more about considering literal systems of movement; feeling the experience through your body lends it a performative element that’s apt for the Flynn. And seeing into these hidden spaces that are so important to the functioning of our society and economy satisfies a childlike curiosity that viewers might not even know they have.
It’s a playful and fun 20-minute experience, for which audiences should definitely make time before Flynn events or on Saturday afternoons through the end of the year. “It holds this beautiful tension of that joyful journey of the box,” Wahl said. In his view, the installation also nods toward a deeper question: “What are the systems that guide our world?”
“The Parcel Project” by Johannes Bellinkx and Daan Brinkmann, on view through December 31 at the Amy E. Tarrant Gallery at the Flynn in Burlington.
This article appears in Oct 15-21 2025.
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