this year is the first time i attended to Shanghai Earts festival. it was their second edition, so i had no element of comparison, not even a lot of informations about it . All that i knew is that the festival was an initiative of Shanghai's municipality (+ Shanghai World Expo Coordination , the Bureau Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality etc...) in any case i find the initiative quite amazing ( we have nothing like that in Beijing) and another good proof that shanghai always wants to show its high tech profile to contrast with authoritarian artistic Avant garde of the Capital, héhé.
the theme of the year was : "urbanized landscape" which sounds very much like any contemporary Chinese theme because the city is the most visible and overwhelming reality in this country.
it's like some kind of motto :"the city, the mankind, the city= reflection of the nature manipulated by mankind , the city getting beyond man's control, bursting with issues and also beauty". blablabla
see the introduction below:
Urbanized Landscape
Lisa Zhou, the General Curator of Shanghai eArts Festival
The word landscape in Chinese is not only a way of describing a physical location. The word landscape also conjures up the social, economic and cultural life of a place. To put it simply, landscape conjures up the human dimensions of a place.
In any landscape, the human presence is crucial but in an urban landscape it is particularly important. We all know that human action and behaviour have had effects on the urban landscape, whether for good or bad. This has always been the case. But now the urban landscape is undergoing ever great changes, One cause is the increasing density of population in cities. Another cause is the way digital technologies reconstitute the urban landscape, through complex communication networks. It is possible that this digital technology will enable us to reimagine the urban landscape
As cities continue to change and develop, urban landscapes remain in a state of flux - and become the subject of local and global fascination. And one issue predominates: how can we accommodate nature in these urban landscapes? It’s hard to know why this question has become so pressing. Perhaps it is a revulsion against materialism? Or a longing for a city that is closer to the notion of an organic community? Or the imperative of sustainability? At the heart of this question is the issue of ‘belonging’.
In the history of art and the humanities in China, the landscape has always been at their heart. The questions now are: can digital technologies help us to renew the urban landscape and our relationship to it; and what exactly is the relationship between a material landscape and a digital one?
In addressing these questions, artists are central for they are the ones that can help us to reimagine our own living space. It may be that digital artists can help us to reinvent the urban landscape, fill it with an inner spirit.
Last year, the theme of Shanghai eArts was ‘The Wisdowm of Crowds’; this year we develop the spirit behind that question with the focus on Urbanised Landscape’. We invite everyone to participate and help us to imagine a new urbanised landscape.
The festival was scattered in different zones throughout the city: Pudong , Yangpu and Xuhui.
and when you say scattered in a city with the size of Shanghai , it is for real!
Pudong, the new development area ( in the east bank of Huangpu river ) was definitely the focal center of the festival, as it has been utterly conceived to be Shanghai's pole for science and new technologies ,therefore it provides the most infra structures for this kind of events.
The night of the opening we went there with Xiongwei, Linyu, Linjian, and saw a lot of other friends there at the entrance.
The thing is that nobody could enter the site of the performance. NOBODY. the guards wouldn't let people with staff passes in! that was highly comical! artist Zhang Peili came outside to give some spare invitations to Jiang Yipeng and couldn't get back in , hahaha!
The reason the guards at the entrance gave us was that the capacity was exceeded , which was a lie of course, the site had nothing but space ...
nobody knew what to do , first it was said that no invitation was needed to attend, then even artists could let people in or get in themselves, passing phone calls was useless.... sooooo, we all stayed there patiently expecting for a Deus Ex machina which happened for me and Linyu in the shape of a sprint inside while the guards were busy with something else. i felt like a kid , it was quite fun.
The site was quite amazing. in the middle of high buildings there was a huge stage put on the top of Pudong river with about 20 meters screens above.The audience was seating on the other side of the water, so there was at least 10 meters in between. Which felt good for some shows, as you really had the impression to be looking at a interactive landscape and which was bad for other shows which needed proximity ( i bumped into Sklotz / Kogen -i never knew that they were playing there - who were a bit pissed off because their performance involved recordings of plants and sand and very precise things that would be completely damaged by this distance).
i didn't see their performance in the end because i came with Dead J and Chen xiongwei who were performing in the Xuhui Zone and that all performances of all zones started in the same time at night (7.00) and that Pudong is at least 30 minutes drive from Xuhui. Maybe it sounds lame ,but it's like that.
also i'd like to paste the whole program of artists performing on that huge stage , but i can't find it on the website and nobody that i know was given a printed program so.... i know that i saw Wang chang cun( boring), Laetitia sonami (www.sonami.net) some very good japanese act that i can't recall the name of....this kind of unveils the main problem of this festival: COMMUNICATION!!!
nobody in this town knew what was going on. Very few of my Shanghai based friends knew there was a festival.
Performances were supposed to be open to public but in the end the public wasn't informed or couldn't go in....
Extract from www.smartshanghai.com
Little did you know, a music festival is transpiring in Shanghai right under your very nose -- or maybe you did know and you just didn't really care, but then this article isn't for you I guess. The eArts Festival is happening right now and if you've never heard of it, perhaps you know it by its other name: The "Thing that Autechre is supposed to play at. Isn't that in Pudong somewhere? When is that anyways?" Festival. About Autechre: They ended up canceling for some reason or another, but who give a shit 'cause seriously... what the hell has Autechre done for you lately? Nuts to you, Autechre. Anyways the eArts thing started on October 18 and live performances by various electronic/ experimental artists will be occurring right up until October 22. That's three more nights of neat blips and bleeps, and other experimental wackiness that will leave you edified off your ass.
Still in Pudong area was another stage responding to the name of ,the details are on the website (thanks). this show mostly featured the chinese scene: gogo, kafka zhang, B6, Memo,Long2 etc..
“Feng•Shui Omniscience”Outdoor Interdisciplinary Project
Venue: the riverside plaza (20,000 m2), Zhangjiabang River
Time: 2008.10.18 – 10.20
Curator: Yang Lei and B6
There is a life besides Pudong (ouf!)
that 's Xujiahui area. the area curated by Davide Quadrio, Defne Ayas and their arthub crew. That's where i programed Dead J 's live act accompanied by visual artist Chenxiongwei.
Xujiahui, at the difference of Pudong's Silicon valley-esque gigantic proportions is much more on a human scale. It's just a normal neighborhood full of life, malls, markets, people walking, crossing the streets etc...
the performance area was located inside Xuhui's park , therefore it was the most public orientated event of the festival. In shanghai parks don't follow the imperial designs of Beijing, there are just wide open, with no fences or barriers, there are just what we simply call a public space in the west. the kind of place that is almost impossible to utilize on a civilian level in Beijing if you want to do more than elderlies' valse , yangge dance and aerobics ...
that's a very very good point about Shanghai i have to say. It feels like public art is just possible there, that initiatives are less submited to political paranoia...maybe it's a dream i had but from what i saw in Xuhui's park , things were going on on smoothly. Everynight at 6/7 o'clock people started to gather up around the stage , the autumn temperature was ideal, common people were going for their nightly stroll and would stop by to look at all those lights and abstract visuals they probably never saw before. Nothing felt ridiculous about it eventhough Dead J was scared that "laobaixing" (common chinese) wouldn't understand his music or even freak out.
once again the only thing is that you could feel that no targeted marketing has been done to drag young people, nightlife people, creative people...
The friend of Communikey's Kate, Pia, found me by chance there. She also was tripping on the deconnection between the actual event and its crowd.
But everything went well, Dead J put on his cosmonaute outfit and painted his face white. There was some sounds problem at the begining of the show but then it went ok, chinese grannies and grand children were all dancing at the end of the show!
AND THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER!!!!
dead J at Earts /visual by CXW
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