Following our fascination how a city is a construction of an expression of human nature, dreams and projections, this critical research-based project goes far beyond an ordinary urban study. We looked for the genesis of the state of mind, for the mythologies and most of all for the phantasmagories that inhabit the young megacity Chongqing in south-east China.
Chinese cities are the new reference of urban experimentation, where the unthinkable and the big exists. This extravagance makes chinese cities, specially Chongqing, to icons of themselves. Chongqing underlies a radical transformation, cased by an authoritarian led political system, which steer the space production. This practice generate consequently a plenty of architectural mutations, irrational phenomena and fragments of utopia. Architecture and urban structure become a visual representation of the current chinese urban politics and create a unprecedented living environment which affect and modify daily life as well as social structures of Chongqings inhabitants.
We explored and localized the current as well as the future phantasmagories and mental representations, which coalesce this – in the rest of the world unknown – megacity in order to document the rapid mutation of cityscape. Fantasmagoria of Chongqing is a snap-shot introspection of the city.
Fantasmagoria of Chongqing was developed in the frame of a five-week Artist-in-Residence at Art Space Organhaus and was exhibited at Art Space Organhaus in Chongqing from 22.03. till 28.03.2013. The project is documented by a publication.
Chongqing
vast, dense, inland, west,
heavy industries history, hight-tech future,
magnet for peasant workers,
rural,
tough city, pragmatical uses,
once the capital, now the laboratory for chinese megapolis,
directly under the central government control,
development, harmony, heritage,
tabula rasa,
new cities, economic zones, university towns,
domestication of the topography,
towers, overpass, tunnels,
car culture,
smog,
vast, dense and ever growing