SYMPOSIUM & TALK
Transversal Alliances: Architecture, Anthropology, Filmmaking and Performance
Friday, 11 October 2024.
Architectural Association, London, UK
The Transversal Alliances symposium takes the process-oriented, transdisciplinary approach explored in Ripple Ripple Rippling as its starting point while going beyond the specific Chinese context.
In a world where debates are becoming increasingly divisive, transversal alliances are needed more than ever to defy flattened narrative and reductive abstraction.
In a world where debates are becoming increasingly divisive, transversal alliances are needed more than ever to defy flattened narrative and reductive abstraction.
Through presentations, conversations, screenings and performative sections, this symposium shares boundary-pushing practices across architecture, anthropology, filmmaking and performance. Grounded in the complex, messy realities of life, this gathering charts ways of confronting the fractured, disjunctive conditions of all our existences, while affirming how one’s life is intricately connected to another.
SESSION 01:
Speakers: Jingru (Cyan) Cheng & Chen Zhan
In conversation with Ingrid Schroder and May Adadol Ingawanij
Cyan and Chen will share stories of ‘Rippling’ – Pond, Yard and Pinewoods, while unpacking the evolving methods and media of communication of this work over a decade, from architectural documentation to participant observation to performative improvisation to collective happening. They will then be in conversation with AA Director Ingrid and writer and curator May to further explore transdisciplinary practices.
SESSION 02:
Speakers: Mengfan Wang and Moe Satt
In conversation with Erin Li
This panel brings together theatre director and choreographer Mengfan, visual and performance artist Moe, and curator Erin to explore their shared interest in how everyday performative expressions inspire choreography and art making. Through a lecture performance, Mengfan will attempt to relay a collective image, mother – woman – granny, found and felt in Shigushan village. The lived histories and spiritual practices of female bodies are transformed into a series of movements. From there derives shared memories of ‘bitterness’ (ku 苦), alluding to ‘being old’ and ‘growing old’ in the present. Moe will screen his short video Hands Around in Yangon (2012), introduce his new solo exhibition Rest the Thumbs on the Cheekbones at Delfina Foundation, and detail how his observation of everyday hand gestures in various cultures developed into recent experiments in expanding embodiment through instructions, participatory installations, and performances. Moe, Mengfan and Erin will then be in conversation to explore the intersections and varying contexts of their practices.
RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING AS A POINT OF DEPARTURE
Speakers: Jingru (Cyan) Cheng & Chen Zhan
In conversation with Ingrid Schroder and May Adadol Ingawanij
Cyan and Chen will share stories of ‘Rippling’ – Pond, Yard and Pinewoods, while unpacking the evolving methods and media of communication of this work over a decade, from architectural documentation to participant observation to performative improvisation to collective happening. They will then be in conversation with AA Director Ingrid and writer and curator May to further explore transdisciplinary practices.
SESSION 02:
BODY & THE PERFORMATIVE
Speakers: Mengfan Wang and Moe Satt
In conversation with Erin Li
This panel brings together theatre director and choreographer Mengfan, visual and performance artist Moe, and curator Erin to explore their shared interest in how everyday performative expressions inspire choreography and art making. Through a lecture performance, Mengfan will attempt to relay a collective image, mother – woman – granny, found and felt in Shigushan village. The lived histories and spiritual practices of female bodies are transformed into a series of movements. From there derives shared memories of ‘bitterness’ (ku 苦), alluding to ‘being old’ and ‘growing old’ in the present. Moe will screen his short video Hands Around in Yangon (2012), introduce his new solo exhibition Rest the Thumbs on the Cheekbones at Delfina Foundation, and detail how his observation of everyday hand gestures in various cultures developed into recent experiments in expanding embodiment through instructions, participatory installations, and performances. Moe, Mengfan and Erin will then be in conversation to explore the intersections and varying contexts of their practices.
SESSION 03:
Speakers: Laura Huertas Millán and May Adadol Ingawanij
In conversation with Stephen Hughes
This panel will start from an excerpted screening of artist filmmaker Laura’s experimental shorts in which architectural elements play a central role: The Labyrinth (2018), Jeny303 (2018) and Aequador (2012). The role of architecture in these works serves as a starting point to unpack the weaving together of ecology, fiction, historical enquiries, and diasporic trajectories via methods intersecting cinema and experimental ethnography. The unpacking will be carried out through a conversation with writer and curator May with interjections of May’s long-term work on Animistic Apparatus, a curatorial research project committed and connected to Southeast Asia exploring the relational, futurist, and agentive forms of artists’ cinema via exhibitions, screenings, artistic research field trip, commissioning, talks and publications. Animistic Apparatus places Southeast Asian contemporary artists’ moving image practices in constellation with the region’s animistic practices including itinerant film projection rituals performed as spirit offerings. Laura and May will be joined by RAI Film Festival Director Stephen to further explore the relationship between their practices and anthropology.
SESSION 04
Speaker: Francesco Garutti / Canadian Centre for Architecture
The Canadian Centre for Architecture presents Into the Island (2024, 41 min), the first documentary of Groundwork, a CCA ongoing film series on contemporary ecological practices. Into the Island follows architect Xu Tiantian during preliminary site visits on Meizhou Island. Famous as the site which gave birth to the cult of the sea goddess Mazu, the island is an environment where religious pilgrimages and mass tourism, traditional farming techniques, and strict conservation policies co-exist in a fragile balance. This screening opens a discussion on the CCA’s approach to cinema as a curatorial tool within their research and exhibition projects.
SESSION 05:
Roundtable moderated by Shumi Bose, bringing together Chen Zhan, Erin Li, Francesco Garutti, Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Laura Huertas Millán, May Adadol Ingawanij, Mengfan Wang and Stephen Hughes.
FILM & THE ETHNOGRAPHIC
Speakers: Laura Huertas Millán and May Adadol Ingawanij
In conversation with Stephen Hughes
This panel will start from an excerpted screening of artist filmmaker Laura’s experimental shorts in which architectural elements play a central role: The Labyrinth (2018), Jeny303 (2018) and Aequador (2012). The role of architecture in these works serves as a starting point to unpack the weaving together of ecology, fiction, historical enquiries, and diasporic trajectories via methods intersecting cinema and experimental ethnography. The unpacking will be carried out through a conversation with writer and curator May with interjections of May’s long-term work on Animistic Apparatus, a curatorial research project committed and connected to Southeast Asia exploring the relational, futurist, and agentive forms of artists’ cinema via exhibitions, screenings, artistic research field trip, commissioning, talks and publications. Animistic Apparatus places Southeast Asian contemporary artists’ moving image practices in constellation with the region’s animistic practices including itinerant film projection rituals performed as spirit offerings. Laura and May will be joined by RAI Film Festival Director Stephen to further explore the relationship between their practices and anthropology.
SESSION 04
ARCHITECTURE, FILM & THE CURATORIAL
Speaker: Francesco Garutti / Canadian Centre for Architecture
The Canadian Centre for Architecture presents Into the Island (2024, 41 min), the first documentary of Groundwork, a CCA ongoing film series on contemporary ecological practices. Into the Island follows architect Xu Tiantian during preliminary site visits on Meizhou Island. Famous as the site which gave birth to the cult of the sea goddess Mazu, the island is an environment where religious pilgrimages and mass tourism, traditional farming techniques, and strict conservation policies co-exist in a fragile balance. This screening opens a discussion on the CCA’s approach to cinema as a curatorial tool within their research and exhibition projects.
SESSION 05:
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
Roundtable moderated by Shumi Bose, bringing together Chen Zhan, Erin Li, Francesco Garutti, Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Laura Huertas Millán, May Adadol Ingawanij, Mengfan Wang and Stephen Hughes.
Planetary Everyday: Jesse Darling in conversation with Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan
Architectural Association, London, October 2024
Field Forum is a series curated by Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan that centres the interconnectedness embedded in the built environment, attuning our senses to material flows, planetary scales, intergenerational times and all the life entangled in these processes.
For full dertails of all sessions, please click here︎︎︎.
For full dertails of all sessions, please click here︎︎︎.
Jesse, Cyan and Chen hosted a casual floor-based conversation for the evening, transforming the AA Lecture Hall into a threshold space that facilitates bodily connections to the earthy ground.
Through the live-performed visual dialogue of works between Jesses’ sculptures and Cyan and Chen’s research and films, the conversation brings forward the view that everyday objects and experiences are planetary – that is, not grand and abstract but rather specific and grounded in situated contexts. Audiences were encouraged to sit low or lie down softly in any restful and comfortable way to listen and reimage the coming-into-being of things and materials in the everyday context and your relationships with them.
Through the live-performed visual dialogue of works between Jesses’ sculptures and Cyan and Chen’s research and films, the conversation brings forward the view that everyday objects and experiences are planetary – that is, not grand and abstract but rather specific and grounded in situated contexts. Audiences were encouraged to sit low or lie down softly in any restful and comfortable way to listen and reimage the coming-into-being of things and materials in the everyday context and your relationships with them.
Back to EXHIBITION ︎︎︎
Go to PROJECT ︎︎︎
Meet the TEAM ︎︎︎
More on CONTEXT ︎︎︎
Check FIELDWORK ︎︎︎
View FILM ︎︎︎
Return to HOME PAGE ︎︎︎