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Susanne Winterling, Between Heaven and Hell. Courtesy of the artist.Starting in Shanghai 2005 and carrying on in Singapore 2006 and Venice Biennale 2007, Migration Addicts project still works on negotiating migration concept today through discussions with curators, artists, and other people in the art world.
Presenting Migration Addicts in Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture is actually a symbolic turn to the starting point of Chinese modernization and experiment of Shenzhen model. The project will serve as a small retrospective with selected artists’ works that followed the project during its development and new site projects by Jin Feng, Xiang Li-Qing, Tang Mao-Hong and Susanne Winterling as well as a project proposal recently submitted to the biennale.
Migration Addicts began as an ongoing project, investigating how migration re-determines issues related to human identity, gender, and spiritual needs, touching upon topics that concern not only Shanghai but also many other expanding Asian and Western cities. The exhibition structure meant to be flexible, elastic, and constantly renewed, each time inviting new artists to enrich the dialogue, and to show strategies of their own interventions related to the topic of migration.This form of exhibition, though seemingly spontaneous, is able to give birth to new possibilities, as well as to explore new ways of independent artistic expression responding to various localities where the exhibition takes place.
The fast expansion of urban spaces, following the model of modernization, has led to new social conflicts within the Chinese social structure. The urban environment and consumer’s desires constantly attract the rural population into the cities. This flow challenges the existing social structure and at the same time infuses the cities with dynamics. Migration is a phenomenon that all big cities around the world are compelled to deal with. The communities and the people that migrate are those who actually take part in the process of re-construction and transformation of the places. They are the ones that bring new vitality to a city.
Shenzhen as an experiment of Chinese modernization was an important site to explore regarding the migration issue. As a city of a special economic zone, Shenzhen attracted in 90s flow of migrants from the rest of China looking for a better life. One of the main objectives of the project was to present the phenomenon of villages in the city that took place because of the migrant population. Villages in the city held the major population involved in the urbanization process of Shenzhen, but were isolated from the urban structure. The city government in 2005 came with ideas of reform for these villages that led to demolishing the village complex and building new real estate property. The plan didn’t solve the problem. What happens to that part of the population, and how do actual reforms influence this community? The same problems Shenzhen is facing are occurring around the country: the social milieu affected by modernization and the following aftermath that happens in urban and rural areas.
Migration Addicts attempted through artists’ projects to initiate dialogues with this special community in Shenzhen. The project aimed to develop durational, dialogical, research-based interventions involving citizens, but at the same time to downplay artists’ role as a producer of images and expand the notion of performance in the dialogue that might help breed mutual understanding.
Because of the need for durational research and long-term organization project, a number of the artists’ projects failed to come through and complete their site-specific character. Although these projects are not realized projects, proposals of the artists are exhibited in the retrospective part of the exhibition. At the same time, the presentation of the artists’ proposed projects and actual completed work shows the tension between trials and realization possibilities. Whatever the content is in these proposals and finished projects at Migration Addicts, the exhibition raises important questions for project research in Shenzhen, questions that are in discussion during the biennale ïâ¬Âª
