Mappe cinesi

SE IL 18 GIUGNO vi capita di essere a Pechino, si apre alla Factory 798 la mostra "Map Games: Dynamics of Change", che racchiude i cambiamenti in tre anni sulle visioni futuribili della capitale cinese. Curata da Feng Boyi, Monica Piccioni, Rosario Scarpato e Varvara Shavrova, la mostra resta nella capitale cinese dal 18 al 28 giugno (questo l'indirizzo completo: 2nd Floor Exhibition hall of Building No 2, 32 Baiziwan Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100022 ) e poi si sposta prima al Museum and Art Gallery di Birmingham e poi al Terni International Center for Contemporary Art, più prosaicamente noto come ex Opificio Siri.



Money Quote: “Map Games: Dynamics of Change” is a new international visual art and architecture project. Traditionally maps are meant to provide us with reliable information on unfamiliar places. A map is a tool that we most solely rely upon when we arrive at a new destination. Maps give us a level of personal independence and allow us to explore new locations, becoming our essential “lingua franca”. Maps can be records of personal experiences, kinds of diaries documenting personal histories in relation to time and place, and can be seen as universal yet personal records of relationship between the “self”, the inner, and the outer worlds. Apart from providing geographical “portraits” of particular areas and locations, maps have political significance, representing most aspects of our lives, from population distribution and ecological issues, to demarcation of borders and nations.

In Beijing the dynamics of change are so great that the process of creation, adjustment and production of the city map simply cannot keep up with the “butterfly effect” of the city's exploding construction busyness and the consequent rapidly changing dynamics of the city's geography. The daily, if not hourly changes taking place in the city creating the state of continuous flux mean that the map can only exist, like the city itself, in the same state of constant, explosive and sometimes illogical change.