we are made of iron

Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secrecy the human dress.
The human dres is forged iron,
The human form a fiery forge,
The human face a furnace sealed,
The human heart its hungry gorge.

- Willian Blake: A Divine Image, from Songs of Experience collection, 1974

THERE IS NO I IN TEAM– Chinese Video, Live Audio-Visual and Performance Art & Radio Show @ Program e.V. , Berlin _ 15.10 - 17.10.2009

Image: Meiya Lin_The times are summoning  / Video installation / 2007 

THERE IS NO I IN TEAM

Exhibition & Radio Show on Chinese Video, Live Audio-visual and performance art

As part of „THERE IS NO I IN TEAM“s international tour, this 3-day event happening at PROGRAM, Berlin, from 15th to 17th October 2009 brings together cutting-edge CHINESE VIDEO, LIVE AUDIOVISUALS AND PERFORMANCE ART and creative communities from both China and Berlin. 

The event is structured around the idea of making a live radio show focusing on rhizomatic networks stretching out from China to Berlin. The guests for THERE IS NO I IN TEAM belong to the same network of people who create their artistic projects on an individual basis but yet become public through a team of people who provide a context to make it public. 

The radio program created around the existing project THERE IS NO I IN TEAM installs itself in an exhibition space where the video works of Meiya Lin and Jin Shan raise questions about the role of the individual, hierarchy, power, migration, public space, market strategies and capitalism. These questions set up a framework for the talks, interviews, skype-conversations and lectures of the radio program and will be broadened further into 3 series of Chinese short films, screened in the evening. The radio show will be available as a podcast after the event but visitors are invited to drop in the ‘studio’ during the show. 

On the evening of the 16th there will be an audiovisual performance of Dead J and Chen Xiongwei where the outer space dub electro mixed with cold and warm soundscapes of Dead J melt into the urban sketches drawn by CXW. Harndorf, known from the collective Torstrasse Intim, will join us on the evening of the 17th. The very neurotic and very German figure has promised to learn some English so she can share her crude views on life, art and postmodern food with us in her live lecture „[ai] [ai] [ai]“. All of the above builds up the 3-day event THERE IS NO I IN TEAM, which will be literally, through the participation of HomeShop, and metaphorically an open ‘window’ from Berlin to Beijing.

Taking its title from an American motivational statement, used to encourage people to abandon their own ego and self so as to be an effective part of the team, the project has been curated by a ‘team’ of European and Chinese curators (Pauline Doutreluingne, Keri Elmsly, Keith Whittle, Jiang Jian, Leo de Boisgisson, Anne Rottig and Beatrice Leanza) each contributing a unique cultural viewpoint, whilst also sharing their firsthand knowledge of contemporary China and its rapidly expanding arts and music scene, in all its cross-disciplinary nature and differing methods of representation. 

Following its successful first staging in Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) presented by /sLab and Isis Arts in February 2008, and at venues such as the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, and further to its more recent presentation at the V&A, London in June 2008, we bring the project to Berlin in October 2009. 

Program Thursday Oct 15 

12:00  Opening „There is No In Team“ video art exhibition with works from Meiya Lin (CN) and Jin Shan (CN) 

4:00 - 6:00pm Radio show: Individual and Groups in Beijing and Berlin after the eighties 

8:00pm I would do anything for love (Chinese short films) 

9:30pm B-movie: Peking Monster by Peng Lei (CN) 

Program Friday Oct 16 

4:00 - 6:00 pm Radio show: China‘s Creative topography and Getting Lost Together

Interviews with Moving Cities (BE + PT), Lin Yu (CN) and performance by Christine Woditschka (DE) 

8:00pm Mythic moments (Chinese short films) 

9:30pm Live electronics + A/V performance: Dead J (CN) + Chen Xiongwei (CN) 

Program Saturday Oct 17 

4:00- 6:00pm Radio show: Creative actions! Case Studies 

Berlin talks: Club Transmediale 

              Torstrasse Intim (DE) 

China talks: Li Zhenhua (CN) on Laboratory Art Beijing 

8:00pm Public Viewings 

Mnemonics of the Self and Social Space in the film works of 7 Chinese artists 

9:30pm Performance / anti-stand-up comedy / lecture: Harndorf (DE) 

Artists:

Meiya Lin (CN), Jin Shan (CN), Dead J (CN) + Chen Xiongwei (CN), Harndorf (DE), Home Shop (CN), Peng Lei (CN), Huang Rui (CN) & Berenice Angremy (FR), Christine Woditschka (DE), Christiaan Virant (US), Cheng Ran (CN), Sheng Jie (CN), Meng Jin (CN), Song Tao (CN), Gao Yu (CN), Sun Xun (CN), Wu Junyong (CN), Joyn:Viscom (CN), Tsui Kuang Yu (TW), Chen Xiaoyun (CN), Lu Chunsheng (CN), Gao Shiqiang (CN), Zhang Ding (CN), Shi Qing (CN), Qiu Anxiong (CN)

THERE IS NO I IN TEAM

Oct 15 - 17 2009

daily 2:00 - 7:00 

Program e.V., 

Invalidenstraße 115, 10115 Berlin 

(U6 to Zinnowitzer Str.

S1/S2 to Nordbahnhof) 

Tel. +49(30) 39 50 93 16 

www.programonline.de 

Free entry, 

Friday night from 8:00 3 € fee

Sponsored by ifa - Institut für Auslandbeziehungen e.V. 

FURTHER INFORMATIONEN

Pauline Doutreluingne

Tel +4917625650172 

pauline@berlin-china-bridge.com 

info@berlin-china-bridge.com

www.berlin-china-bridge.com 

info sheet with full info to download here

Meta Magazine

A cabinet de curiosités visionary projects, assembled stories, views into the abyss of visual information.

www.meta-magazine.com is now online, with contributions by:

Jacques Fresco, utopian Futurist
Ruaminx, mask designer
Hans Sylvester, tribal photographer
Dave Bunnel, cave explorer
Claude Cahun, icon
Chen Wei, Chinese tableax vivants galore
Situ Studio, architects of indeterminacy
David Beth & Ailen Roc, Sex Magick practitioners
Sergey Maximishin, from Russia with love, and more.

Join us for Meta’s launch event on 
Friday April 17, 7-11 PM
HOF 96, Torstrasse 96, Berlin
performances by Snax & Le Mercier, One Sick Girl

Uekermünderstrasse, Berlin

ich liebe plattenbau

GROPIUSSTADT

a perfect sunday afternoon in berlin

my days of snow

More on Art Hub

http://www.yishujournal.com/story.aspx?uid=2008101914212079

EARTS SHANGHAI

http://www.shearts.org/

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

back from the south

i just got back to Beijing after ten days in the south. Beijing feels more grey and rough than ever.It's cold already , i have to buy gloves for riding my bike and to organize my days according to the temperature.
When we were in Shenzhen and Guangzhou , Chen Xiongwei was cursing all the time at "beifangren" (northern people) saying they were rude, unpolite, uneducated and lazy, that they didn't know how to do business, blablabla... it was funny ,like his southern roots came back all at once with the moist and the green surrounding us.it was like all of sudden he realised the life style he lost when he moved to Beijing: the flip flap shoes attitude, the slowly but surely way of doing things, the amazing food, the organic and busy street life with its little shops: drink shops, flower shops,fruit shops, oysters stalls,meat sticks stalls,late hour munchies food stalls etc...
it is true that southern China has an amazing rythm. people seem to always be doing something that makes its little sense in the long life chain, there are a lot of people in the streets, less space than in Beijing but all motions are quite fluid.
Back to Beijing, it feels like the hibernation time is close and that this olympic summer counted for nothing...we're going to go through this dark and dry season wearing long johns and watching dvds and then we'll be in 2009, a year that doesn't predict to be an easy one when you work in culture (why did i chose to do this in China, i'm so stupid)
as a matter of fact, not a long ago i and other organiser friends suddenly realized that it would be the 20th anniversary of TianAnmen's incidents in 1989 + the 60 years of PRC....
This predicts a lot of paranoia (again), and a high probability to have a sort of giant curfew on everything like they're able to do here as soon as the public order is concerned...
if it really turns out this way (which is very possible) I MOVE SOUTH!!!!!!

dark days poetry

Picture by Georg Gatsas

Inspired in my days of darkness from the land of Werner Herzog, I would like to share this thread of poetry written by Alexandra Blätter describing the mood for "process dark", the exhibition she curated...

A dark scene is holding court. Its current capital city is New York. 

The Anglo-Saxon world is – and always has been – so very much darker than the rest of the world. Of course, the French have also had their dark and even dismal phases, but over a century has run its course since then. The Germans, the Scandinavians, the Dutch, the central and southern Europeans have probably never had it – this propensity for an all-embracing melancholy.

In Eastern Europe, the Russians have no doubts cultivated their own brand of devotion to darkness but nothing of the kind has penetrated our climes via dark Asians, dark Africans or dark South Americans. That makes the Anglo-Saxons veritable kings and queens of darkness.

Dark was La Belle Dame sans Merci, black romanticism, the Romantic Agony, Lou Reed at his best, Arthur Rimbaud and his colleagues, Iggy & the Stooges, Kurt Cobain and others. Caspar David Friedrich is probably a romantic but not necessarily dark. If at all, it would more likely be Gustave Moreau or Gabriele D’Annunzio (Italian, yes, but an exception), Lord Byron or August C. Swinburne. Possibly also Bas Jan Ader, Dutch expatriate and American-by choice, metaphorically balancing on the brink of the abyss in his films and photographs. On the verge of the abyss, there is something lustrous, mighty and especially seductive about dark. Except that contemporary figures are less inclined to venture beyond the abyss; instead they skillfully skirt around the danger zone, an agenda also embodied by the no longer fledgling New York (art) commune represented here.

Dark is a state of mind. Not necessarily black, but certainly offbeat; dark – unconventional and shady – also walks abroad in the twilight zone. Dark feels good in the vicinity of dopey narcotics. Opium and absinthe are classics; Coke and viagra cocktails are more contemporary. Symbols are legion: death’s heads and other tattoes, black leather coats and sunglasses, peachy skin and additional clichés. Laughing is not good, dark rings around the eyes are much more authentic, fat won’t do, the emaciated look is more appropriate (Franz Kafka – German, yes, but an exception – was supposedly anorexic) and casting a melancholy eye on the world-at-large right on target. 

Dark is a state of mind, the above-mentioned ingredients its unmistakable symptoms.

I found this interesting cyprus  artist's blogspot: christodoulospanayiotou.blogspot.com

I like this videos you can find with the rainbows and the peace pigeon who falls dead

so enjoy beybey peace and the rainbow conspiracy!

Chenxiongwei's solo show "visual pause"

Feng jiangzhou's performance @ Universal studios

Feng jiangzhou's performance @ Universal studios

youtube doesn't fucking work here in Beijing since a few days.
i wanted to upload a video....here are some pics instead.
the performance was really good: feng jiangzhou, dead J , Yangtao, Jiajia, LiuYuan.
A massive dyptique made of moving chinese traditional landscapes
asian beauty!

Shadows of your story

FILM BLICK AUGEN SCHNITT
Ein Forum für Filmemacher_innen und Film-Liebhaber_innen
A forum for film makers and film lovers

warmly invites you to:

8.10. Shadows of your story
Curated by Pauline Doutreluingne

An evening with short films from 4 remarkable young filmmakers, Patrick Carpentier (BE), Luz Diaz (BE), Iris Piers (NL) and Linus Ricard (SE), who capture sensitively the beauty, fears, daydreams, obsessions and passions of our life stories in moving images.

Patrick Carpentier
Les 9 mardis
27', 2005
www.intothefight.com

Iris Piers
Casmiration or the beginning of Dreaming
3'33, 2007
www.irispiers.com

Luz Diaz
Silent Bodies
17', 2007
www.myspace.com/lescorpssilencieux

Linus Ricard
Sound:Isjtar
Ember
4'42, 2007
www.linusricard.com

doors open 20h, film starts 21h

Raumerweiterungshalle
Werbellinstraße 50
Berlin

U8 Boddinstraße

temporary new url: www.raumerweiterung.tk

IT ONLY TAKES A FEW SYNTHETIZERS TO SEND PEOPLE UP IN THE AIR

Air's gear !

the cat says hello to you Pauline!

MILK IS NOT FASHIONABLE ANYMORE

the holy drink of the "reforms and opening" era is about to lose the whole thing.
now everybody is going to drink soya milk again ,before they realized how much it's processed too!
man, what is going to be left to eat????

Thought of the day

some men wear suits to go to work
and some other wear suits because they are too cool to wear jeans.
usually these men are rock stars and they don't have the same haircut as the working men either.
that's it