THE MOBILE LAB | 3 Sub-Containers For 1 Discursive Environment

The mobile lab is a truck unit provided with a large projection screen which becomes a site for artistic intervention delivered to/through the city while moving through 3 locations over 6 days (2 days at each stop). It is a site for performances/artists' presentations, open talks, lectures and public screenings.

The vehicle of the Mobile Lab represents a small-scale mode of public intervention, adaptive to the city's artistic infrastructure, institutional system and urban representations.

It strategically captures while exposing the possibility of expedience as a collective form of cultural action. It compresses in camped actions and visual arrays yet not invading the public

domain, but conforming to its large scale, flowing nature, fragmented circulation of community-performances and sporadic self-organizational practices.

This projects attempts at introducing alternative ways for communicating and producing discourse, lifting the intellectual voice of Beijing 's cultural middle-field players against the stagnant market language of art tycoons. By engaging the public and the content makers in a different form of collective participation consistent with the local reality we are producing a cultural statement and visionary yet hopeful proposition to the local community by going against its unequal and sometimes uncommunicative methods of knowledge transfer.

The programmes and events featured in the Mobile Lab will be articulated into 3 main subject-containers, aimed at illustrating within a multidisciplinary context how issues pertinent to local artistic and philosophical analysis, spatial practice and the media performance, can inform about a singular regime of vision born out of a unique urban one, and, while being confronted with the specificities of selected international practices, ultimately investigates the characteristics/possibility of new subjective orders.

Venues : Beijing Film Academy > CAFA > Park lot by the Drive-in Movie Theatre ( Liangmaqiao Road )
Daily Structure : 4 sets (1: warm up of short screenings; 2: open talks/lectures; 3: on site performances/artists presentation; 4: screenings)

Time : overall an 8-hours schedule starting from 4/4:30 PM until 12:00 PM

"...That is why Pasolini demonstrated that the essential thing, precisely in free indirect discourse, is to be found neither in language A, nor in language B, but in ' language X', which is none other than language A in the actual process of becoming language B." (Deleuze & Guattari quote Pasolini from L'experience heretique )
The mobile lab is a running discourse between A and B.
Concept and Program Structure: Beatrice Leanza ( Beijing – Hong Kong)

Curated by :
Beatrice Leanza | BAO Atelier ( Beijing – Hong Kong) and Chaos Y. Chen| CHAOSPROJECTS |VisualThinking, China

INTRO:
Domains: the City v/s the Image: New Regimes of Vision
Having already put in place the grand utopian framework of Modernization China is moving towards a second urbanization process (Zhou Rong), one that inaugurates a dialectic departure from the structural atonal construction of Reality as the physical stage of Law and Order (the political space as the manifest discourse and laboured appearance of power) to institute a critical movement towards the understanding of Reality as a place for subjective agency, and thus one of perpetual challenge, where life, real life, reverses, annuls and ultimately attacks -by means of its exceptional rules- our deepest consciousness about its continuous production (communication and consumption).

If the mobility of globalized economics has “renewed attention to the local situations and translocal existences” (Liverpool Biennial 06, City Breaks Symposium) accounting for their competence to inform how art can inflect (either mirror back) new social spatialities and temporalities, how does Chinese locality communicates, documents and further questions or subverts the uniformity and ubiquity of the contemporary spectacle of modernization

What does the constituent relation between traditional aesthetics and national politics produce as a visual synthesis (and thus a cultural gaze) about ruptures in time and space, in the private and the collective.

Between visibility and invisibility “ where do the innumerable rituals of everyday life” strand their oblique trespassing In a Continuous city, where does the real begin, where does it end Furthermore debates focusing on our predominantly visual culture increasingly disclose the relating aspects between psychological and socio-political constructs about states of self-confinement, migration and control (informing about new dimensions of communal organization, forms of sovereignty and ‘states of exception', perception and formation of identity). While the specific conformation of cities like Beijing has ingrown such spatial constructs (gated-communities, self-organized urban districts, qu-s baojia-s and danwei-s, green-belts ecc), new social ones are emerging in signalizing new referential models coming from media and popular culture.

As an event that focuses on the identity of moving images - evocative per nature of suspended narratives and internal orders collapsing the signification of reality - Borderline investigates specific modes of existence.

Periodizing Participation | Identity in the Age of Urban Narcosis |  
(25 – 26 June) - BEIJING FILM ACADEMY

Escalation: Collapsing Reality |  
(27 – 28 June) – CENTRAL ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS  

Land: Translation |  
(29 – 30 June) – DRIVE-IN MOVIE THEATRE PARK LOT