Last summer, a critical “cultural exchange” led to another kind of unexpected trajectory, meeting Italians in the hutong, meeting 1,500 bricks, all the serendipitous occasions* to generate a certain interest in something as random as the building block, parts and parcel, production and pieces. If we should start from the elementary, we come upon the city, piles in preparation, rubble. It’s a deception, that solidity, for things break and fall apart as much as they are constructed. Such temporalities come fired here in coal burning kilns—in both an economic and an environmental sense a dangerous consideration of only the momentary—things are just not built to last. Our building block seems more a blockade than an independent solidity, less object (or part thereof), but a conjunctive to be considered alongside the motion around it: the brick is door stop and speed bump and chalk all in one. Solidity delineates, separates, blocks, protects and becomes an object of relation. Then add sticky rice, and we’ve got all the time in the world.

Mud brick by Stephanie Shepherd

Artists Stephanie Shepherd and Barbara Balfour recently came by HomeShop and we happened to stumble upon our common interest in sticky rice and bricks, though Stephanie has taken it to a critical experimental level, self-concocting her own re-mixture of an ancient technique involving a sticky rice mortar (found dating back to the North-South Dynasty, 386-589) to attempt an ultra durable block similar to those found as parking markers all over the city. A thousand year old blockade, a point which we would be invited to keep coming back to again and again. To delineate or separate, block or protect, to become an object of relation. These are continuities more than divisions as we might have first thought, the building blocks of an imagination for another time-sense.

from the series “Behind the Restaurant”, by Barbara Balfour

Would it be possible to say the same for something non-created, or to ask further, what forms of imagination take place in a way of seeing? Barbara’s series of photographs of the backside of the Tuanjiehu branch of Beijing’s famous 大董 Dadong Roast Duck restaurant take on a similar time quality, though here solidity comes in the form of constancy and routine. Continuities embed themselves in the daily processes behind, outside of and next to the restaurant’s main activities of cooking and eating. People enter in and out, make and receive deliveries, take inventory, line up for staff meetings, take smoke breaks. While the camera maintains a fairly fixed position from her apartment window, the frame is searching, zooming in or out and moving somehow relative to all the action below, an object of relation.

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*Further reading about contemporary brick production and serendipity can be found in the second issue of Wear journal, published May 2010. In response to Sportsbabel, I don’t know if better bricks would necessarily slow down the process of killing ourselves, but those were a nice conjoining of material loops. Not what contemporary capitalism is good at at all, indeed.

I became interested in brick masonry and production while writing an article for the last issue of wear journal, finding out tips of the iceberg of what a mess coal-fired bricks (the standard in China) pose to the environment. Though they are the world’s output leader in this industry, Chinese brick factories are also characterised as one of the least modern industrial sectors in China. Small, village-run production units employing outdated technologies are spread widely throughout the country, and more than 90% of bricks are fired in annular kilns with coal as the predominant fuel, resulting in substantial SO², CO² and other air emissions.

Below is a small (lego-sized) but potentially revolutionary process composed of sand, common bacteria, calcium chloride, and urea (yes, the stuff in your pee)” that could “reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by at least 800 million tons a year.” Read more about these home-grown blocks here.

[all photos above by 高灵 GAO ling] more about the welcoming home of 1,500 bricks can be found at instant hutong. Beer and curious passersby make for a less than “silent insertion into the hutongs”, but more than one week later our mini-veranda is still standing, waiting to be taken away or re-used, maybe a new fort for the kids or just another kind of looking in and out…

After more than a week stuck in the depot, after the ship around the world, after being carefully put together, on display in Terni and Birmingham, repacked and reorganised, we were forced to come back.

[photo by 高灵 Gao Ling]

and what could one do but stack everything up again, rebuild and redesign, finding a place, holding broken pieces with two hands.

[photo by fotini lazaridou-hatzigoga]

We make so-so walls, says a migrant worker who observes from the side. He’s been up since 6:30 am and now it’s overtime, but you all are doing the same thing now and it’s fun and it’s art. 有意思.

it’s not a mockery but the squeeze of bureaucracy, a reaction and a kind of productivity. Half a wall, a peephole, a veranda, place to aim, balcony, blockade.

Welcome home, bricks.

(The return of 1,500 China-made bricks was organised 29 August 2009 by Marcella and Stefano from Instant Hutong, Elaine and Fotini at HomeShop. Thank you to everyone in the assembly line…)