AA alum Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan have received a Graham Foundation Grant for their project, Ripple Ripple Rippling in collaboration with director and choreographer Mengfan Wang. Additionally, AA History and Theory Tutor Guillermo Sanchez Arsuaga has also received a grant for the publication, Sick Architecture, with Nick Axel and Beatriz Colomina.

Ripple Ripple Rippling works closely with the village community in Shigushan, Wuhan, China, who are part of the country’s 295 million rural migrant workers. A site of both labour supply and resource extraction, the mundane village life and landscape embody the social and ecological consequences and dependences of China’s urbanisation. For rural migrant workers, known as the ‘floating population’, the dissolution of their families is a survival tactic that fundamentally challenges the nuclear family model. What has emerged is an intergenerational, interdependent way of living – a ripple effect of domesticity.

The publication, Sick Architecture, is an interdisciplinary research effort, originally launched by Beatriz Colomina at Princeton University. The publication, which is in collaboration with e-flux Architecture, brings together a wide range of investigations into how health and sickness have shaped architectural practices and discourses from ancient civilisations to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sick Architecture is not simply the architecture of medical emergency; it is the architecture of normality. Health crises are inscribed into the everyday. Architecture carries the traces of prior diseases and has been completely shaped by them. Each medical event activates deep histories of architecture and illness, along with all the associated fears, misunderstandings, prejudices, inequities and innovations. Each architecture tries to erase the memory of the sickness that gave birth to it. Sick Architecture tries to reverse this forgetting. It does not seek to rationalise recent global health events or speculate about their consequences. Instead, it offers a wider, historical and more complex discourse with which we may think about the present.

Image: Still from Ripple Ripple Rippling.