Shanghai Futurism III: Futurist Visions in Architecture for Shanghai
Time: 2:00 pm Saturday, 23 May, 2009
Venue: At Lounge 18
4F, Bund 18, 18 Zhongshan Dong Yi Lu, near Nanjing Lu
A session on architecture, speed, motion, and urgency. We will get together to discuss dynamic ideas for a new kind of architecture for the city of Shanghai. The designs should be playful, provocative and lively. Please join us! Featuring Shanghai Expo 2010 Dutch Pavilion designer and artist John Körmeling; visual artist Alicia Framis; artist-architect collective Speedism; and architect Koon Wee.
The celebration of the centenary of the publication of The Futurist Manifesto continues with an exciting session on architecture, speed, and motion this time, in collaboration with Lounge 18 in Shanghai. (Worth noting: The Futurist Manifesto was published in Shanghai in 1921, and had an enormous influence on the designers and artists of the period.)
To explore Futurist Visions in Architecture for Shanghai, Shanghai Expo Dutch Pavilion designer, architect and artist John Körmeling will join together with visual artist Alicia Framis, artist-architect collective Speedism, and architect Koon Wee to discuss dynamic ideas for a new kind of architecture for the city. With a keen eye on the present and future state of architecture in Shanghai, their discussion will both review the conceptual underpinnings that inform their respective practices and tackle such questions as: What issues in architecture today relate to social change and cultural activism? How to imagine a city that values visionary architecture over commercial real estate? How to bring about more playful and provocative strategies that explode our notion of architectural practice and the limits of reality? Can architects work more with contemporary artists to galvanize public interaction? Neville Mars of Dynamic City Foundation will moderate the panel. Organized by Performa’s Defne Ayas.
This study session is a dynamic continuation of the research on Futurism’s influence in China that was begun in March 2009 with the discussion Graphic Design and Typography in China as part of the Shanghai International Literary Festival at M on the Bund, where panelists Lynn Pan, Ou Ning, and Pan Jian Feng elaborated on the challenge of capturing ideas for visual record and provided an overview of 100 years of design history in China, and continued with Inner Noise from New Asia, an evening of noise music that used the Futurist manifesto, The Art of Noises, as a historical reference point and featured new work by contemporary performers from different parts of Asia (Subjam, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, FEN and Shanghais Asthma Writers Union, and MTDM). The next Futurist event will take place on June 6th at MoCa Artlab, to be followed up with a music survey in December 2009.
Participant Bios:
Alicia Framis (born 1967 in Barcelona, Spain. Lives and works in Shangai) is currently working on the democratization of the moon as part of her ongoing exploration of new ways of living together, after previous projects such as Guantanamo Museum or New Buildings for China (2008). Framis has exhibited her work in international venues such as the MOCA Museum, Shanghai, Mass MOCA, North Adams, the MUSAC, León, and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. She was part of Utopia Station, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2004 and of the 2003 Venice Biennial.
Architect, engineer, visual artist and freethinker John Körmeling (b. 1951) is the designer of the Dutch pavilion, Happy Street, at the World Expo Shanghai 2010. His designs contain ironic observations of our often uniform tastes and habits, combining almost cartoon-like forms with such trivial items as fairground lighting and advertising. Körmeling’s recent projects include Hot Spring a 25 meter high map in the Japanese town Matsunoyama that visitors could climb at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennal in Japan; Drive-In Wheel, a giant Ferris wheel for cars on which drivers can briefly escape the traffic jam.
Speedism is the duo Julian Friedauer and Pieterjan Ginckels. They work in the field of architecture, architectural theory, visual arts, visual theory, urban tactics, imagineering, visual arts and scriptwriting. Currently in residence at CrystalCG as visual artists and architects, Speedism develops visual universes, theoretical landscapes, denkraume, narratives and scenarios, blurring the line between their imagined cities and possible Chinese real-life counterparts.
Along with his two partners, Koon Wee runs sciSKEW Collaborative, an art, architecture and design firm with offices in New York, Shanghai, and Singapore. Using their theoretical research as a platform, sciSKEW’s recent work in China focuses on the rapidly expanding high-end lifestyle market. Evolving out of a need to reconcile the triangulated geographies, the initial disparity between the three cities became raw material that feeds the work. sciSKEW seeks to create architecture that can bridge, critique and translate between systems and societies. Their work ranges from art and media installations, residential and commercial developments, to master-planning and consulting for public engagement and inspiration.
Neville Mars is architect and chairman of the Dynamic City Foundation, an international urban research and development platform specialized in rapidly changing environments, in an effort to combat what he calls “the present dream and the future nightmare” of people-packed mega-cities in China. He is the author of The Chinese Dream – a society under construction (010 Publishers, Rotterdam ‘08).
About PERFORMA
Performa, a non-profit multidisciplinary arts organization established by art historian, curator, and critic RoseLee Goldberg in 2004, is dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century. Performa launched New York’s first performance biennial, Performa 05, in 2005, to tremendous critical and popular acclaim. In 2007, the second biennial, Performa 07, was an even greater success than the first. The next biennial, Performa 09, will take place in New York from November 1-22, 2009, featuring the work of over 100 artists at more than 80 venues across the city.
PERFORMA09 (November 1-22, 2009), the third biennial of new visual art performance, will take the 100th anniversary of the publication of F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto in 1909 as its point of departure. The biennial will look back to the radical propositions of the Futurists a century ago, and forward to a vision for the twenty-first century as imagined by today’s artists. Using the Futurist template of manifestos-for-the-future in all disciplines, PERFORMA09 will explore exciting new ideas in visual art, film, noise, music, sound, poetry, graphic design, dance, architecture and urbanism. The city of New York itself will be featured as an evolving ignition of ideas and limitless dimensions, its streets, walls, transportation and airwaves providing a platform for public engagement and inspiration.
Special Thanks to Arthub Asia, Italian Cultural Institute, Dynamic City Foundation, CrystalCG, Vanna Teng, Maximin Berko, Stephanie Kung, Philip Kelly, Luca Silvestri, Markus Steger, Balwinder Ghag, Pia Johanson and Yi Zhang.
