Further images / Return to 2012
Description: The Action Researcher/Performer constructed three towers that were wheeled by local Beijing residents silently through the familiar neighbourhood of Bei Gao ‘Feijiacun Village’ and down the bustling main street of Dongxingdian. Perhaps as a premonition of what was to come, these newly designed structures loomed high over the one-story houses and artist residencies, ear-marked for possible demolition now that the new train line connected this outer suburb through Cuigezhuang station to the city. There was great pride in what the village had made, and now, what the greater city had become, but at the same time sorrow for what had been destroyed. A few years ago the nearby village of Suojiacun located closer to the train station was demolished and this had the community in Feijiacun on edge. Brick after brick, concrete pour after concrete pour, the Village witnessed the beginning of this new construction, each day another level higher, a bigger, encroaching Beijing. The overwhelming construction of high-rise vertical estates was a significant feature across the otherwise flat landscape of Beijing. Multiplying and mutating in design simultaneously, these building constructions appeared like steel and concrete architectural spores reproducing over and over again to create a mammoth scale city that already seemed at capacity.