BORDERLINE | AS MEGAFORM - A UNIQUE URBAN PALIMPSEST | BORDERLINE 07

Borderline is a Beijing-based urban palimpsest evolving into a 9-day long main event held annually at the end of June (dates for 2007 will be 22 June – 1 July).
It is developed through a wide range of activities centred on the identity of the moving image and predicated on the hybrid nature of the contemporary cultural one. This venture looks thus at promoting itself as a continuous experience extended throughout by means of customized events, special projects, on-going workshops and educational programmes in collaboration with different local and international institutions and educational structures; as an urban laboratory it promotes an intellectual nomadism delivering always renewed forms of communication and production.
Concretely we envision this endeavour more as an experience-making machine which will evolve into a series of actions/events (locally and internationally) representing participation and narration, while culminating in a constructed sequence of projects unfolding throughout different spaces and locations around the city.
A scenario of liquid disciplines, Borderline will be drawn as a long cord superimposing the city, a narrative (achieved by sets of exhibitions, performances, workshops, lectures, concerts, public screenings) that will guide people into a sited reading of the city, an urban story-telling in the form of a huge mobile lab.
Bridging perspectives from installation, short film, documentary, animation, performance and music, sound art, new graphics, architecture and design, Borderline will be forged as a cadenced experience from point to point, like a dilated vision appropriating the city, a temporary firmament which, instead of blowing the city up, will progressively reveal one of its possible universes onto the city's flowing fabric.

BORDERLINE SCOPE AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

BACKGROUND: SHAPING PROXIMITY | ART AND THE PUBLIC

Since 2002 the Beijing artistic scene has incrementally grown into self-contained urban areas (art districts) where an exuberant variety of both commercial and non-profit venues are providing the artistic population and the general public with ‘a least’ common territory. A phenomenology dictated by the city’s urban setting and historical development - one of coexisting flexibility and fragmentation, crescent seclusion of specialized urban zones, gated quarters and multiple communities, too - has so far resulted in a form of conceptual disconnection among the spaces themselves and a passive, non-directional artistic discourse .
Moreover, market and private-driven initiatives, often the sole forces behind the staging of a “space for expression” are alone incapable to thrust artistic experience towards the accumulation of a public realm, and thus the automatic production of creative capital for the city is brought to stagnation.
Still, new spaces are emerging and new synergies are to be consolidated between a growing international plateau of young and senior professionals looking to China and a more refined idea of local to acquire the means to plant and nurture soil toward new directions of art, curatorial and exhibition models, spatial solutions and critique.
At the same time, this push seeks to further the horizon of the global cultural sphere eastwards.
By appealing to this pre-textual conformation and the growing capacities that artistic experimentation with video, new media, sound and electronic techniques allow, new audio/visual languages are sought for by both artists and the interested public, we wish to initiate a whole new territory for their local and unique upbringing.
By predicating our effort on the mobility of thinking and an intellectual nomadism, we promote their integration with the fabric of Beijing itself: an immense “surrounding” of grids, rings and overlaid networks, of disconnected “multiple territorial moments” (S. Sassen).

>>>>It is by exploring Borderline as a theoretical domain (potentially one propelled by its local interpretation, i.e., the forms of cultural life that the city as a border zone produces, how it is narrated and made continuous), that we realize it as a metaphorical landscape (staging the conceptual integration of a new visionary regime born out of a unique urban one).

WHAT ABOUT BEIJING | NEW VISION

Foreword:
Emerging as the theme of focus for the 10th Venice Architecture Biennale,
“the interactions between cities, their built form and their inhabitants” are regarded
as key factors to understanding how contemporary social, economic, and cultural
transformations are affecting the way people live, work and move within large-scale
metropolitan areas around the world. How do local city environments iterate global
forms and (alternatively ) deal with them

With the beginning of the new millennium, East Asian cities have been at the center of both theoretical and experimental research fueling speculation around the gradient of innovation with which they are predicting new/future urban conditions.
Indeed, as we look at the structural transformations impinging on Chinese urban life, we experience how the new taxonomy of space has finally brought the strategic post-democracy of cultural containment – one which has so far short-circuited centers and peripheries – forward to the no-hierarchy sprawl of an organic city.
Cities like Beijing are witnessing a staggering rise of architectural objects (-systems) and increasing density, proving that the development of large metropolises as coherent entities “can no longer be realized to the dictates of some master plan, nor can be developed in culturally significant ways on an incremental basis” (Kenneth Frampton).
Here the capacity to mediate private and public stances onto a durable scenario is most often discussed in terms of how ‘identity” and ”difference” can be fostered in line with the ascendance of transnational interdependence and social growth.
It is along these lines and by allusion to its multi-disciplinary vocation that we envision Borderline as a hypothetical megaform. As Frampton describes it, a megaform is “a unifying environmental trope which has the capacity to inflect the existing urban landscape and insinuate itself as a continuation of the surrounding topography by giving it a particular orientation and identity”. With its structural and
mechanical subsets, topographical character, forms of extension/expansion and densification, Beijing’s unexplored potential of creative innovation is setting forth new questions and visions.

In a continuous city appropriating flow as a modicum to survival, how does locality communicate about global issues pertinent to urban life against the aesthetic and philosophical ecosystem of art
While international curatorial policies are growing incremental strategies by frontiering urban and geographical peripheries onto a no-gravity artistic universe, borderlines seem to remain the only cultural quanta to maintain a politically disputed, critical and aesthetic domain of reference. In remaining central to the concern of artistic research and philosophical discipline and site of the essential dialectic confronting man and universe, borderlines are the loci of uninterrupted practice.

OUR AIM: TOWARDS A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The Borderline Organizational team works with a flexible structure and sees itself as recipient of a continuous discursive process, one so far prevented in the region by the imperative methods of global cultural expediency and the economics of mainstream discourse in contemporary art.
We maintain that for a durable transformation of “sites into contexts”, a conscious juxtaposition of what is nationally and historically constructed with the “locality” of the global phenomenon should become precursor to a strategic evolution of intellectual capital.
In response to the existing geo-political changes implicating the Asian region with an ever-expanding (artistic) network (highlighted especially in China by the country's entry into the WTO), we draw our conceptual container towards the marking out of a whole new territory.
Our metaphorical landscape appropriates the vocabulary of the Hyper-Modern, of Bigness and a “regime of complexities” in which the new is created amongst a “promiscuous proliferation of events that react to one another”, by embracing that resourceful field of potentiality that fluctuates among “disarray, disassembly, disassociation, extreme difference”” (Rem Koolhaas).
Borderline chooses to engage with these juxtapositions, forging a meeting place for speech in the image-world, where confines become open representational stages and experimental build forms. By approaching “the centres from the margins” we aim to examine the dialectical space of “informal forces” (Jiang Jun) that wields the interaction between forms of ‘control’ and ‘out-of-control’, the locus of power and life.
In this sense the geography of Borderline becomes one of new urban spatialities and temporalities where in the “interplay of their difference, strategic openings have emerged”. “The global city is a border zone” and it is in those new generated environments that “comes the possibility of a whole series of new economic and cultural projects” (S. Sassen). By connecting dominant cultural considerations to its immediate environment, bridging perspectives from a wide variety of subject areas, disciplines and spatial languages, this venture aims at exploring the terms of a new regime of vision impelled by local urban dynamics to promote an authentic discourse of invention and experimentation among diverse territorial, conceptual and academic investigations.

In a mission integrating identity and creative development, we feel motivated to fill up an infrastructural chasm by securing financial and institutional stability to artistic and intellectual endeavours while integrating the city in an open-ended yet firm form of communication.
As global connectivity has progressively moved economic and social integration eastwards, the cultural implications of such a development are increasingly shaping into a fast and vibrant production of new urban life, especially manifest in the visions of a challenging architectural evolution, new living systems and transportation, human identity and connectivity .
Nevertheless the possibilities of investigation and thus investment that are sought by the rapidly growing “cultural industry” have still yet to find a sustainable site for encounter and discussion, often remaining alien to intellectual publicity.
In particular, academic/educational, technological and artistic achievements and leading fields prompting innovation are missing an open and articulated ground for sharing discussion and finding opportunities of connection and collaboration.
So it is in the logic expression of this economic potentiality, the urban uniqueness of the city of Beijing and its booming yet not fully explored artistic capital reaching to/from the range of new media and video that we want to engage our cultural efforts.
This action, aimed at bridging research and experimentation to the physical territory of the city – and thus the public - will act in shaping two forms of connectivity:

_ a structural framework (among existing artistic and educational institutions, artistic
spaces, larger artistic events and to-be-explored urban settings); and
_ a professionals’ cross-border network (among international experts and players
ranging form various fields in the arts, new technology, design, architecture, music,
performance and science).

By eventually enabling the consolidation of a durable network within China among the Asian region and the international scenario, we look at enlarging its scope as a documentable infrastructure. This formal engagement derives from the wish to initiate an archive summoning material and information regarding the historical evolution and future outcomes of field research/experiments in its immediate
environment so as to become, at the same time, an active interlocutor on a borderless landscape.