AA aumni Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan’s short documentary ON THE MARGINS (v.2023) received the Special Mention at the Arquiteturas Film Festival in Porto, Portugal. This year’s Festival, which marks the event’s tenth anniversary, was organised by INSTITUTO with the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) around the theme ‘Where Life Happens’.

The main feature of this new 2023 edition of ON THE MARGINS is storytelling through filmic collage. A series of time-based spatial collages highlights the crucial role of thresholds in conditioning an intergenerational, interdependent way of living that is somewhere between the family and the collective. The film is part of Cyan and Chen’s ongoing collaborative project RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING, a transdisciplinary framework at the intersection of architecture, anthropology, performance and filmmaking that recognises, articulates and communicates the non-discursive, bodily knowledge embedded in the everyday practice of the dissolved household in contemporary rural China.

Read more on the project website.

Image caption: Film still from ON THE MARGINS (2023), a short documentary film co-directed by Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan