Film : Into Eternity by Michael Madsen (79min)

English and Japanese subtitled

Date: Saturday 31st March 19:00~ / Saturday 7th April 19:00~

location: 家作坊 HomeShop［map]

cost: 60yuan (with Hot sandwich and drink)
money will support running cost of HomeShop and a Japanese documentary filmmaker who works on nuclear power issues in Japan

The 2011 earthquake and resulting nuclear power disaster in Fukushima, Japan showed that the world’s resources are finite, while causing long-term dysfunctions of current social systems in the cities, where life with Cesium will have to be confronted for extended and indeterminate periods of time. And who imagine that nuclear waste are stored for 100, 000 years!

Recent HomeShop visiting friend Vera Tollmann has written a review:

nuclear waste must be securely stored for 100,000 years due to its potentially lethal radioactive radiation. But where? How are we to relate to such an immense period of time? Is anyone at all in a position to take on the responsibility for this length of time?… more

Contact: NGO fu-jin Network Beijing and HomeShop

2011年5月18日至2011年6月5日
18 May – 5 June 2011

“大陆漂流.中国”活动将众多的艺术家，策展人，理论家，与活动家召集到一起，共同探索当 代地理政治转化对于公共框架与亲密生存 空间的影响。在一周的时间里，本活动将“漂”在北京，尝试将抽象分析（经济，社会学，都市生活研究，美学等等）直接导入不同的艺术实践当中。通过报告，工 作坊，讨论会与实地考察等方式，我们希望自己能在闹市与乡间的穿梭中构建一个充满欢乐，感觉试验，偶遇与思考的游历方式。

The Continental Drift China brings together artists, curators, theorists, and activists to explore the impacts that current geopolitical transformations are having on the public frameworks and intimate environments of existence. For one week, the roving seminar will drift through Beijing, endeavouring to bring abstract analysis (economics, sociology, urbanism, aesthetics, etc.) into direct contact with situated projects. By way of presentations, a workshop, discussion sessions and site visits, the project provides a movement through space thriving on conviviality, perceptual experimentation, unexpected encounters and informed travel in both metropolitan and rural settings.

活动安排 SCHEDULE

欲知所列每项活动的细节，请看本安排表下的具体内容。请注意不是所有的活动都在同一场所，活动地址安排如下：
For detailed descriptions of each of the events listed, please see below. Note that not all events are at the same location; addresses are listed accordingly.

【 合辑 Selections 】底特律音乐人类学赏析，王念华主讲  /  an evening of musical anthropology led by Dan S. WANG

5月19日，周四，晚上7点开始
地点：家作坊，东城区交道口北二条8号
Thursday, 19 May, 19.00
location：HomeShop, Dongcheng District, Jiaodaokou Beiertiao 8

【 杨先让 YANG Xianrang 】（艺术家， 曾任中央美术学院民间美术系主任）讲座  /  a Talk with Professor YANG Xianrang, artist and former head of the Central Academy of Fine Arts Folk Arts and Crafts department

5月21日，周六早上10点半开始
地点：家作坊，东城区交道口北二条8号
Saturday, 21 May, 10.30
location：HomeShop, Jiaodaokou Beiertiao 8

【西遊计划 Journey West 】艺术假扮旅行社简单开张  /  A “Journey West” Travel Agency performative soft opening

5月21日，周六下午4点开始
地点：钟楼湾胡同41号
Saturday, 21 May, 16.00
location：41 Zhonglouwan Hutong (next door to The Drum and Bell Bar)

【《北二条小报》工作坊 Beiertiao Leaks self-publishing workshop】

5月22－23日，周六到周一，早上10点开始直到印刷完毕
地点：家作坊，东城区交道口北二条8号
Sunday & Monday, 22-23 May, 10.00 until the presses are hot
location：HomeShop, Jiaodaokou Beiertiao 8

从5月23日“大陆漂流”继续向武汉与重庆漂流，6月4日返回北京。如果你对我们下一步的旅行感兴趣，请e-mail垂询： lianxi[圈A]homeshop[点]org[点]cn。
From the 23rd of May until the 4th of June, the Drift continues on to Wuhan and Chongqing before rounding back up in Beijing. If you are interested to continue with us on this leg of the journey, please inquire: lianxi[at]homeshop[dot]org[dot]cn.

【 “大陆漂流.中国” 总结论坛  Continental Drift China Final Forum】“哪里哪里” 艺术空间将与大陆漂流参加者联合举办一个开放总结论坛。更多的详情稍候发布。 /  The Where Where Exhibition Space in Caochangdi will host a final forum with China Drift participants open to the public. More details to be announced.

6月5日，周日，下午3点
地点：“哪里哪里” 艺术空间
朝阳区草场地村319-1艺术东区A区内
Sunday, 5 June, 15.00
location：Where Where Exhibition Space
No. 319-1, East End Art Zone A, Caochangdi

—–
本次大陆漂流活动由 “我们家” 青年自治中心，“家作坊”，“哪里哪里”策展联盟，与“罗盘”（美国中西部激进 文化走廊）等组织共同合作举办。
The Continental Drift China is developed by Desireè Youth Autonomy Center, HomeShop and the Where Where Curatorial Collective, in conjunction with Compass (of the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor).

豆瓣同城活动 Douban event page：www.douban.com/event/13954395/

更多关于“大陆漂流.中国”的参加者信息，继续读… For more information about participants of the Continental Drift China, please continue reading.

(more…)

国际大缝隙——香港和深圳之间的口岸，或在所有的国与国之间，区与国之间的那些转换地，也就是那些既不属于此国也不属于彼国的国际空间，有时候只是几栋楼房的距离而已。那些有限的 “ 之间 ” 和 “ 飘地 ” 。

身处此地，我们一下子变得什么都不是，也什么都不能做，只能张望和等待。

或许有一天，我们应该在不同的“ 国际缝隙 ”中同时穿梭，算好时差，带着气球。

Mercer Consulting, the world’s largest human resource firm specialising in investments and outsourcing, prepared their 2009 survey of the world’s most livable cities, always a favourite among statistics fanatics who enjoy seeing where they stand relative to everyone else. In the current setting where our cities are becoming more and more alike and many of us are more and more able to act as agents of cultural exportation and outsourced production, surveys such as these are immediate markers of the mass human structuralisation, where according to real variables we can judge the quality of our lives.

The downside of this cosmopolitanesque proposition is that it establishes one standard for what “high quality” should mean and how we can hierarchically rank ourselves next to everyone else. This is useful, of course, to the sorts of companies to which Mercer’s research is tailored, but we should be careful not to confuse the criteria of “global firm” with that of the richness of daily life at ground level.

To be able to accurately calculate their findings, Mercer must be able to find horizontally equivalent categories of comparison. These include: consumer goods, economic environment, housing, medical and health considerations, natural environment, political and social environment, public services and transport, recreation, schools and education and socio-cultural environment. What does this mean, exactly? That we should be buying the same types of goods, that we can only be worthy if we are wealthy and that we should all be receiving the same type of education? Can our socio-political freedoms be counted in numbers of legislation when techno-media influences are deeply linked to certain underlying economic/political agendas?

Thinking a bit about the cosmopolitan geographies that Bea is building for her research, I wonder how the real diversity and livelihood of a city can be calculated. The local seems to be neglected in a large-scale survey such as Mercer’s, but like Butler asks, what are the useful outcomes of contingency “whereby the terms that constitute us are simultaneously deployed, deconstructed, and reiterated”? And like the example of the interviewee who replied that eating at fast food chains such as KFC and McDonald’s have been absorbed enough into contemporary Chinese practices so as to be considered a part of Chinese culture (no longer merely Western), how we distinguish the local from the global is not always so clear. Standardisation in terms of technologies, market diversity, public services and healthcare can be useful and of course in certain terms be beneficial to a greater good. But these standards should hopefully also allow for creativity, recontextualisation and sustainable practices. Western neo-liberal hegemony (with Mercer’s survey as an example of that) has been cunning thus far with its abilities, but we are coming to realise that it cannot and should not be so easily adopted as universal standard.

After that, well…still stuck. Bea, let’s keep going…

all images above taken from the blog of the 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture/Urbanism There are some interesting discussions on the table of late, as the preparations for the 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Architecture/Urbanism are underway, and looking at the blog and various hearsay, the impression is more telling than ever that the age of data is now takes precedent over the built environment. What is local in a Bi-City Biennale so proud of its cosmopolitanism? Hmm… how the guanxi system works in such marvelous ways… Anyhow, on a less cynical note, a friend of mine is working on a project between Athens/Hong Kong, and though I am still trying to piece these two together (ultra classic, ultra future?), he begins from the point of view of the outmoded nature of museums and zoos, whereby “because there is free flow of information and people(?) and goods around the world, there is no need to have everything at our doorstep. That’s why we may be witnessing a flourishing of the local, local conceived on the scale of nations: not as a reaction to globalization, but on the grounds thereof.” I found this to be parallel to the discussion on cosmopolitanism, wondering if the Acropolis in Athens, the Pergamon in Berlin, or Disneyland in Hong Kong are not evolutionary stages of one larger theme park. Better yet, the last version of the Bi-City Biennale seems to be our most ‘sophisticated’ rendition yet. “Built-ness” erodes, giving way to the concreteness of virtuality and the supremacy of networks. Identity and representation of a city may still rely on its iconic architectures, but as he says, “differentiating characteristics”, may be a more accurate term than “identity”. Another postmodernism. Another pluralism. Is this a kind of bottom-up globalization he is referring to? Do we all become do-it-yourselfers then? And what then becomes the role of the institution? As we watch the increasing privatization of our institutions, is there anymore a possibility for the local?

the world seen from geneva and its international organizations. what is this world we are supposed to become to?

photos: wu yihua

Here are some of the texts we were talking about last week…not everything is interesting, but they are certainly very inspiring to explore disjunctures, encounters and globalization:

[modernity at large]
[life of objects]

From “grassroots globalization” :

It has now become something of a truism that we are functioning in a world fundamentally characterised by objects in motion. These objects include ideas and ideologies, people and goods, images and messages, technologies and techniques.
This is a world of flows (Appadurai 1996). It is also, of course, a world of structures, organisations, and other stable social forms. But the apparent stabilities that we see are, under close examination, usually our devices for handling objects characterised by motion. The greatest of these apparently stable objects is the nation-state, which is today frequently characterised by floating populations, transnational politics within national borders, and mobile configurations of technology and expertise.
But to say that globalization is about a world of things in motion somewhat understates the point. The various flows we see—of objects, persons, images, and discourses—are not coeval, convergent, isomorphic, or spatially consistent.
They are in what I have elsewhere called relations of disjuncture. By this I mean that the paths or vectors taken by these kinds of things have different speeds, axes, points of origin and termination, and varied relationships to institutional structures in different regions, nations, or societies. Further, these disjunctures themselves precipitate various kinds of problems and frictions in different local situations. Indeed, it is the disjunctures between the various vectors characterising this world-in-motion that produce fundamental problems of livelihood, equity, suffering, justice, and governance.
Examples of such disjunctures are phenomena such as the following: Media flows across national boundaries that produce images of well-being that cannot be satisfied by national standards of living and consumer capabilities; flows of discourses of human rights that generate demands from workforces that are repressed by state violence which is itself backed by global arms flows; ideas about gender and modernity that circulate to create large female workforces at the same time that cross-national ideologies of “culture,” “authenticity,” and national honor put increasing pressure on various communities to morally discipline just these working women who are vital to emerging markets and manufacturing sites.

If globalization is characterised by disjunctive flows that generate acute problems of social well-being, one positive force that encourages an emancipatory politics of globalization is the role of the imagination in social life (Appadurai 1996). The imagination is no longer a matter of individual genius, escapism from ordinary life, or just a dimension of aesthetics. It is a faculty that informs the daily lives of ordinary people in myriad ways: It allows people to consider migration, resist state violence, seek social redress, and design new forms of civic association and collaboration, often across national boundaries. This view of the role of the imagination as a popular, social, collective fact in the era of globalization recognises its split character. On the one hand, it is in and through the imagination that modern citizens are disciplined and controlled—by states, markets, and other powerful interests. But is it is also the faculty through which collective patterns of dissent and new designs for collective life emerge. As the imagination as a social force itself works across national lines to produce locality as a spatial fact and as a sensibility (Appadurai 1996), we see the beginnings of social forms without either the predatory mobility of unregulated capital or the predatory stability of many states. Such social forms have barely been named by current social science, and even when named their dynamic qualities are frequently lost. Thus terms like “international civil society” do not entirely capture the mobility and malleability of those creative forms of social life that are localised transit points for mobile global forms of civic and civil life.