Antonie Angerer was invited by the Asia Week Copenhagen, organized by the Asian Dynamics Initiative, to present her research in collaboration with artist Yang Jialin on the visual media spectacle of Xiongan New Area. The next day she, together with Elena Meyer-Clement, organized and moderated a panel on community based art practices.

 

The immersive lecture invited the audience to travel into one of China’s most prominent city-making projects, Xiongan New Area. Visual and audio material collected by artist Yang Jialin were brought into dialogue with the research that Antonie Angerer has conducted on collective place-making through media in early urbanization processes. The one-hour performance introduced the visual worlds imagined by both state and non-state actors, paying specific attention to the way the new residents of this future city appropriate the urban space and the state’s narrative. Extending the traditional mode of presentation in an academic setting, the visual material and artistic collaboration showed how collaborating transdisciplinary can broaden our understanding and findings by merging expertise.

The next day the artist and cultural practitioners Chen Yifei, Maj Horn, Regen Li, Martin Wendelbo Rasmussen and Yang Jialin were invited to discuss Community based Art Practices in China and Europe. Each of the panelists shared their practices, how they engage with communities and how they understand communities. The talk showed how each uses the freedom of artistic practice to analyze social, political and ecological issues in both local and internationally. Using publishing, partying, social happenings and performative workshops the artists find new modes of knowledge production all motivated by the same question of how to live together better.

The lecture performance “Spectualtive Cityscapes” was on September 25^th at the university of Copenhagen. The panel discussion “Community Based Art Practices in China and Europe: Resilience through Friendship” took place on September 26^th at Tofu Space.

The project was supported by S.C. Van Foundation, Asia Dynamics Initiative.