Atlas of Transitions
HOME Festival
International Conference
In the conference organized by the Department of Sociology and Economic Law of the University of Bologna, A World in Transition, between Performing Arts and Migration, we take as an example the Pi Village in Beijing and the Delta of the Pearl River to see how immigrants interiors interact with artistic ecology. We also shared with the public the WUXU practices that are aimed at making a speech of the current immigration narrative.
Chinese Karaoke -- Baolijin2019
We have transformed the lesson of School of Integration (the project is created by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera for the Bologna festival) to a KTV room, thanks to the creation of Italianized texts, participants will be able to sing Chinese songs contaminated with Italian hits .
Lesson # 7 China
Chinese Karaoke
Chinese songs and Italian melodies, the story of a contamination born in the 1980s
The Chinese word "Baolijin" comes from Polygram, one of the most important record companies in the world before it melted in 1999. Baolijin series is created by the artist Zheng Ningyuan, produced together with the WUXU association. In the School of Integration it is presented in the form of a temporary Karaoke. Thanks to the creation of Italianized texts, the public can sing (pretending) Chinese songs, which are actually Italian (or European) songs adapted in China in the 1980s and early 2000s.
After the Chinese economic reform of 1978, Western trends and fashions synchronized in China, albeit in a localized way. For citizens, the image of everyday life changes radically. Coastal cities - Guangzhou is an excellent example of this - they begin to import pop music from Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Asia and the western world, a large part of which enters China through smuggling and piracy. The development of the free market in China in the 1980s and 1990s, under the political climate of "Socialism with Chinese characteristics", is very rapid. In those years "Italo-disco" was a great success and Karaoke was widely spread. Polygram popularizes Karaoke, which is still one of the most popular forms of entertainment in China today.
This form of entertainment, created to satisfy mass consumption, has informed everyday languages, social behavior, aesthetics, giving rise to various anthropological phenomena covered by this research. Baolijin series is the activation of a playful dimension that collects collective memories and produces untidy emotions.
Referendum
Referendum is a project created by Tania Bruguera, in the city of Bologna has chosen to give the subject of the work to associations, activists, social centers, etc. WUXU was present as a link to make it possible for the Chinese to participate in this debate. In the assemblies we discussed the choice of the application, respecting the different languages, and the position of the seats, and how to distribute the communication. WUXU in the Referendum ran two seats (one in the Chinese quarter, one at the Bologna Academy).
Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera is at Bologna Referendum. A performance, intended as a "art of behavior", lasting 10 days, which sees the activation of an urban referendum campaign that calls into question citizenship and inhabitants.
"The border limits and connects. It excludes and sets the conditions for inclusion.
Since the mythical story of the foundation of Rome, the walls, whose boundaries are often girded, are bathed in blood: fratricidal blood, in that case. Originally characterized by a plurality of meanings (delimiting the sacred from the profane, good from evil, a private property from another), the border progressively assumes a specific political value in European modernity, marking - through its representation as a line in the papers geographical - state territories and performing various functions in facilitating colonial expansion. It is this linear image of the border that still organizes our geo-political atlas, the map of the world with which we are familiar.
In our time, a set of global processes puts this consolidated representation of the border in tension, transforming its borders into places of intense and often lethal conflict. Mobility control, in particular, is at the center of these conflicts, where other border definitions become again central: race, gender, social, cultural, linguistic etc.
While in the drive to cross borders, a search for freedom and a claim for equality clearly acts, its containment or negation aim to reproduce an unequal distribution of freedom of movement and end up reaffirming the original link between borders and violence. A violence that kills. "
"
——Sandro Mezzadra
It is the invitation to cast their vote on a question concerning migration, born of a public and militant debate that has called together realities active in the area, activists, receptionists, citizens. Urban bulletin boards, radio interventions, leafleting, locations in theaters, cultural centers, social clubs and all the volunteers interested in feeding the public debate on the subject will play a decisive role in the realization of the project.
For the 10 days of HOME it is possible to vote in different points of the city while a scoreboard will mark the daily results of the voting, making visible the urban response to the question and monitoring the horizon of choice of the participants.
Pickpocket (1998)
Jia Zhangke
In collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna, we screened Jia Zhangke's first feature film Pickpocket in Lumiere.