Whose Utopia, Cao Fei (China), 2006, 20 min., digital video shown on DVD

“As part of the Siemens Arts Program I ran a six-month project called What are you doing here? (2006), in which I teamed with workers at a light bulb factory in Foshan, Guangdong Province. If you’re going to embark on something like this, I figured, surely it makes sense to get the workers involved as well. I got them started by running workshops and offered some ideas, but left them to do all the planning and the practical work. Some built installations using the light bulbs they made, while others who liked ballet for example or the peacock dance (a Chinese folk dance) gave performances next to the workbenches where they usually worked. The theme was ‘Your utopia is our utopia,’ and the things they aspire to, are indeed the same things we all want.” –Cao Fei

Meishi Street, Ou Ning (China), 2006, 85 min., digital video shown on DVD, Mandarin with English subtitles

Meishi Street is located on the southwest side of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and runs from north to south. In this old city district, called Da Zha Lan, the city is carrying out a project to improve traffic and facilities for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. On December 27, 2004, the Beijing Municipal Government launched a project to widen Meishi Street to 25 meters from its original 8 meters. Many of the original residents living along the street faced the demolition of their homes and removal to other areas of the city. The story of Zhang Jinli, an inhabitant to be removed and relocated, is a powerful component of this documentary.

Ear to the Ground: Art, Politics and Life

The films and videos of Adberrahmane Sissako, Cao Fei and Ou Ning were previously introduced to Electromediascope audiences in two programs of contemporary work from Africa and China. New works by these artists and French filmmaker Agnès Varda integrate social commentary with experimental approaches to video and filmmaking in Ear to the Ground.

These artists are documenting the actions, stories and local resistance by which culturally displaced people are responding to adversely changing living conditions brought about by the forces of industrialization in Europe and China, large-scale urban redevelopment in China and post-colonial chaos in Africa. We experience through different cultural perspectives the resourcefulness, subjective complexity and political responses of people as their rhythms of life and labor collide in the changing seasons and assembly line production cycles of industrial factories and new urban centers. We also encounter multitalented resourceful and capable people who in the face of loss, privation and displacement creatively construct alternative local strategies of critical analysis, resistance and adaptation. These films raise the possibility that with socio-economic and political support, it would be possible to find sustainable solutions that are in harmony with the local experiences and diverse traditions of living in the world. We are situated at a moment in history where indigenous knowledge is both reemerging and disappearing as it comes into conflict with a rapidly developing world of global political and economic change. This knowledge grounded in creative productivity, cultural diversity and human history is valuable to all of us today.

The works of the artists included in Ear to the Ground extend documentary conventions through performative and experimental forms of restaging, using non-actors to play their own professional roles and presenting stories within stories. These processes generate a bottom-up picture paralleling the practices of gleaning, performance and market place debate that metaphorically and actually function quite differently from the way events are framed by global mass media. Their films and video works create an alternative space that is more in keeping with oral and visual forms of literacy and knowledge production that are becoming accessible across multiple cultures and language groups. Their work represents another phase of electronic media directed to a new global audience for art and socio-political content outside the frame of reference provided by electronic mass media. They also function as a critique of the methods of communication and information dispersal of mainstream media that tends to propagate a top-down master narrative point of view similar to the globalized forces that these forms of media report on and from which they are produced. This text-based model of literacy has distanced us and places us in the midst of a special type of alienation that is becoming inadequate for the kind of social intercourse that can respond to the questions of “Where is the future?” and “Whose future is it?” –Patrick Clancy

Whose Utopia DVD and image still courtesy of the artist and Lombard-Freid Projects, New York.

Meishi Street DVD and image stills courtesy of the artist.

Electromediascope website