Interjectures - in midst of ‘either-or’s
Interjectures - in midst of ‘either-or’s
7 November 2022
Location
33FFB and Online
This seminar series brings forth, through forms of collaborative debates, positions and opinions poised as ‘either-or’ at fractures and junctures of histories, languages, identities and places. These are sites of interruption and mis-alignment, often marginal to centric views, foreign to assumed similarities, strangers to ourselves, where alternative intelligibility has been obfuscated under dominant projections. Each episode engages multilateral and recursive processes of re-reading and contesting stable pictures, particular those conserved through power, morality and tradition, to unravel incomplete and nuanced interpretations - the making of sense amidst digression and transgression - that expose the inadequacy of given meanings and acknowledge productive ambivalence. By operating more as dangerous supplements, complicit mediums, unfaithful translations and precarious hybrids, ‘interjectures’ conjure the ‘either-or’ as possibilities of unexpected affinity that defy the assumed boundaries under disciplinary, territorial, discursive or epistemological terms.
Four seminar sessions on the theme of Relative Autonomy will make up the first episode of the PhD seminar series Interjectures 2022-23. The Relative Autonomy episode will be co-convened by Doreen Bernath and Yunshi Zhou. Each session presents two guest speakers, followed by comments and discussions, and is open to participants from the PhD and graduate school programmes, as well as open to the AA school and community and wider public.
Since the 1950s–80s, with the rise of the Down to the Countryside movements, the spatial model of the countryside gradually shifted away from the historical agricultural society and towards new forms of collectivity that dramatically reshaped the rurality of China. Several concurrent, large-scale movements, from the organisation and establishment of industrialised farms, oil field development and settlements, networks of new communes connecting to existing villages, infrastructural resourcing and territorial management, Red Culture tourism to the Third Front movement produced distinct phenomena of colonisation, migration, territorialisation, typologisation, and relations. This episode of seminars gathers current research on the reconceptualisation of rurality to probe further questions and debates on the particular ambivalence, the ‘either-or’s, between urban and rural transformations, as well as that between superstructures of governance and agency of vernacular relations. One key question is what may be described as certain conditions of ‘autonomy’ that is to be understood not as the assertion of free will of a distinct entity, but certain possibilities of self-determinacy that only arises and works between forces and agencies, ideals and pragmatics, thus contingent to an emergent, temporal set of relations. Being ‘autonomous’, from as small a scale as a companionship struck between farmers and students, to as large as regional nuclei of villages, communes and townships that diverge into a different developmental trend away from the central programme, requires rethinking the subjective, incidental, environmental, and social domains of spatial production that had and most likely will continue to characterise the past and future of China’s towns and countries.
Monday 7 November, 10am – 1pm
From the question of ‘what is our role as architects concerning these rural conditions?’ in the midst of the expanding urbanisation disguised as rural regeneration to the emergence of ‘indeterminate and resilient assemblages’ across vast numbers of dissolved rural families that undo what we know of as domesticity, this first of four sessions to unfold the debates on ‘Relative Autonomy’ will be framed through two different perspectives on forms of practice at the intersection of – reconceptualising rurality and architectural rethinking – that challenge the status quo assumed by the discipline and by the larger socio-political apparatuses. As such, processes that can be characterised as both situated and ambiguous, floating and bodily, social and slow, come together to be discussed, less concerning a projective vision, but more with a recursive engagement that scrolls and unravels a spatial vernacular that is both autonomous and relative, which may have been the kind of interdependencies and collaborations that were and, to be reminded, still are the capabilities of rurality largely forgotten by urbanity.
Schedule:
10am - Peter W. Ferretto: Behind the Rural: Defining A New Form of Architectural Practice
10:45am - Jingru (Cyan) Cheng: Floating, Dissolving, Rippling - From Scroll to Documentary-Fiction Filmmaking
11.30–1pm break, then comments and discussions
Session 2 - Para-works and Youth Agency
Monday 14 November, 2.30–5.30pm
The two presentations that will open the polemics of this session share a story of the arrival of youths, mobilised labourers and their dependencies, who became central to the invention of a form of collective life in all aspects of the self-constructed model settlements, based on equitable, autonomous yet inter-dependent processes of collaboration. Exemplified by this story of an ideal communist society which hinged on the agency of youth, in particular displaced youths who in this instance relocated from the city to the countryside, rurality is reconceptualised through terms that differ from the hierarchical gaze of political, urban, territorial or familial centres. The transitional potential opened up by an industriousness that straddle different forms of work, or concurrent para-works and para-roles, youth agency as revealed in the reinvention of the rural can resist the instrumentalised by the state through the projected, individuated subjects, and can be, which the session intends to explore, a rediscovery of larger relations of parallel and reciprocal existences formed through voluntary means by intuiting opportunities afforded in gaps of identities, movements, economies, kins and aspirations.
Schedule:
2:30pm - Li Hou: Building for Oil: Daqing and the Formation of the Chinese Socialist State
3:15pm - Yunshi Zhou: Rural Agency of Youth and Relative Autonomy
4–5:30pm - break, then comments and discussions
Session 3 - Session 3 - En- and Exclaving
Monday 21 November, 10am–1pm
Boundaries or borders of distinction are not always what lies between a sovereign domain and that which is beyond; the need to encapsulate spaces is often within, to mark and regulate differences, make and defend a secret, expose yet protect a memory, or perhaps to enforce forgetting. The history of Red Culture and its contemporary re-presentation, for reasons from ideology, industry, military to education, spans a vast array of scales in its processes of spatial encapsulation, or en- and exclaving, from the territorial to a personal room. Despite their archipelago condition of being multiple yet apart, en- and exclaves structure the twofold ambivalence between connecting and separating, between what it keeps within and without, such as what is needed to memorialise Mao’s birthplace or to construct ‘non-urban-non-rural’ settlements in the Third Front Movement. These two presentations, by not taking a singular perspective from within or without, reveal productive ambivalence of a condition of being related yet autonomous, and uncanny recognition and identification across what may so far be incorrigible differences.
Schedule:
10am - Gangyi Tan: City or/and Village: Environmental and Typological Transformation of Shiyan City
10:45am - Zhe Dong: Becoming Obsolete: the Culture of Heritage Preservation in Mao Zedong’s Birthplace
11.30–1pm - break, then comments and discussions
Session 4 - Session 4 - Environ Entanglements
Monday 28 November, 2:30–5:30pm
The opportunity of heterotopic and cooperative relations between the aggregation of material interventions and complicit environmental tactics is here explored as a particularity in rurality, not as a fixed physical context, but a mode of working with and working between. This is where a range of otherwise dismissed factors of spatial-environmental transformation – from planned or incidental cultivations, topographical and ecological sensibility, translocational resourcing, gift economy, religious practices, cosmology and superstition, social patterns of assimilation and estrangement, daily and festive rituals, to education embedded in forms of life – presents a series of entangled circumstances that manifest contradictory conditions of being. The particularly of such rurality, as exemplified here through the two specific cases of mountain villages with their environ-connections and self-determined raison d'être, connect with the investigations in earlier sessions on the vernacular as a praxis with both localised specificity and translocational exchanges of live heritage. It contributes to the concept of relative autonomy by expanding the temporal and opportunistic emergence of self-determinacy through specific relations with environmental factors as that which embody immanent and pluralistic forms of co-actions beyond what was previously conceived as human settlements.
Schedule:
2:30pm - Xiang Ren and Xiaolu Wang: Taihuai Village, China: Heterotopias in a Sacred Mountain
3:15pm - Kaiwen Chen: Reconneting Rural-Environ: Collective Cooperation in the Mountain Villages of Beijing
4–5:30pm - break, then comments and discussions