On Borrowed Time is a video installation aiming to portray and recreate the collective memories of Shanghai people living in the lilong, the typical form of residential alley in Shanghai in the 1990s and to reflect on the impact of irreversible urbanization and globalization on traditional architecture. The project intends to realize the presence and absence of lilong through the interplay between real and fictional worlds. Rather than a complete restoration of a specific lilong site, the project is composed of cultural signifiers as a reflection of the artist’s own experience and perception of how the architecture has shaped Shanghai people‘s personalities, lifestyles and human relations.
Instead of a housing style, lilong also reflects a type of urban neighborhood. As the camera navigates through the digitally rebuilt scene, the book-like structure of lilong will unfold in front of the audience, and the everyday life condensed into the small and compact box-shaped row house will also become visible.
In the project, the audience can expect an ambiguous and non-linear narrative of someone murmuring, however, with the absence of them. The narrative recreates the blurred boundaries between private and public space, the 「folded」 space that carries various functions at different times of the day, and the close neighborhood relationship in lilong. The audience is expected to imagine the existence of the lilong as a living organism with closely-connected interpersonal relations based on the fragmented information.
Photos taken from a field trip from last semester:
Reference project
La Town, Cao Fei
http://www.caofei.com/works.aspx?year=2014&wtid=3
In Cao’s video project La Town, the artist built a micro virtual city with toy bricks and shoot a film inside of this virtual city. Inspired by the project, I would like to reconstruct the lilong space through digital media as a self-constructed space.
Overall Moodboard