Architecture

Note: fabric | ch is thrilled to be part of Pro Helvetia's Shanghai best of 2022! Thanks for this new post and for the support to the exhibition at the HOW Art Museum, as well as it's performances and online lectures program during the pandemic!

We were glad to see that the architectural installation fabric | ch realized in this context remained useful also for remote interaction, exchange of ideas and collaboration.

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And it's also a way – and still the time – to wish everyone a good start in 2023! With, we hope, many successes, exciting projects and creative statements responding to the challenges of our time.

Via Pro Helvetia (Visual Arts)

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Our Best Picks of 2022

For art practitioners or audiences alike, it has not been an easy year. The path of global encounter seemed distant for a while, but has never vanished. Somehow we know, maybe in the most surprising manner, that we will meet each other again halfway. It could be one of these reassuring moments that convinced us of hope when the world is turned upside down: the flipping of bookpages, the smiles from digital rooms, a concert without performers, a recital without playwrights. We are so eager to present what has excited, motivated, or touched us in the past year. Scroll down and discover a diverse selection of projects highlighted under the three overarching themes -- support, connect, and inspire.

Wish you a brilliant start and a Happy New Year 2023!

Pro Helvetia Shanghai

Pro Helvetia Shanghai
Swiss Arts Council
Room 509, Building 1
No.1107, Yuyuan Road, Changning District
Shanghai 200050, China
shanghai@prohelvetia.cn

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Beneath the Skin, Between the Machines

Exhibition overview

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“Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.” When Paul Valéry wrote this down, he might not foresee that human beings – a biological organism – would indeed be incorporated into machinery at such a profound level in a highly informationized and computerized time and space. In a sense, it is just as what Marx predicted: a conscious connection of machine^[1]. Today, machine is no longer confined to any material form; instead, it presents itself in the forms of data, coding and algorithm – virtually everything that is “operable”, “calculable” and “thinkable”. Ever since the idea of cyborg emerges, the man-machine relation has always been intertwined with our imagination, vision and fear of the past, present and future.

In a sense, machine represents a projection of human beings. We human beings transfer ideas of slavery and freedom to other beings, namely a machine that could replace human beings as technical entities or tools. Opposite (and similar, in a sense,) to the “embodiment” of machine, organic beings such as human beings are hurrying to move towards “disembodiment”. Everything pertinent to our body and behavior can be captured and calculated as data. In the meantime, the social system that human beings have created never stops absorbing new technologies. During the process of trial and error, the difference and fortuity accompanying the “new” are taken in and internalized by the system. “Every accident, every impulse, every error is productive (of the social system),”^[2] and hence is predictable and calculable. Within such a system, differences tend to be obfuscated and erased, but meanwhile due to highly professional complexities embedded in different disciplines/fields, genuine interdisciplinary communication is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible.

As a result, technologies today are highly centralized, homogenized, sophisticated and commonized. They penetrate deeply into our skin, but beyond knowing, sensing and thinking. On the one hand, the exhibition probes into the reconfiguration of man by technologies through what’s “beneath the skin”; and on the other, encourages people to rethink the position and situation we’re in under this context through what’s “between the machines”. As an art institute located at Shanghai Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone, one of the most important hi-tech parks in China, HOW Art Museum intends to carve out an open rather than enclosed field through the exhibition, inviting the public to immerse themselves and ponder upon the questions such as “How people touch machines?”, “What the machines think of us?” and “Where to position art and its practice in the face of the overwhelming presence of technology and the intricate technological reality?” Departing from these issues, the exhibition presents a selection of recent works of Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Simon Denny, Harun Farocki, Nicolás Lamas, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Lu Yang, Lam Pok Yin, David OReilly, Pakui Hardware, Jon Rafman, Hito Steyerl, Shi Zheng and Geumhyung Jeong. In the meantime, it intends to set up a “panel installation”, specially created by fabric | ch for this exhibition, trying to offer a space and occasion for decentralized observation and participation in the above discussions. Conversations and actions are to be activated as well as captured, observed and archived at the same time.

^[1] Karl Marx, “Fragment on Machines”, Foundations of a Critique of Political Economy

^[2] Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems

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fabric | ch, Platform of Future-Past, 2022, Installation view at HOW Art Museum.

Work by fabric | ch

HOW Art Museum has invited Lausanne-based artist group fabric | ch to set up a “panel installation” based on their former project “Public Platform of Future Past” and adapted to the museum space, fostering insightful communication among practitioners from different fields and the audiences.

“Platform of Future-Past” is a temporary environmental device that consists in a twenty meters long walkway, or rather an observation deck, almost archaeological: a platform that overlooks an exhibition space and that, paradoxically, directly links its entrance to its exit. It thus offers the possibility of crossing this space without really entering it and of becoming its observer, as from archaeological observation decks. The platform opens- up contrasting atmospheres and offers affordances or potential uses on the ground.

The peculiarity of the work consists thus in the fact that it generates a dual perception and a potential temporal disruption, which leads to the title of the work, Platform of Future-Past: if the present time of the exhibition space and its visitors is, in fact, the “archeology” to be observed from the platform, and hence a potential “past,” then the present time of the walkway could be understood as a possible “future” viewed from the ground…

“Platform of Future-Past” is equipped in three zones with environmental monitoring devices. The sensors record as much data as possible over time, generated by the continuously changing conditions, presences and uses in the exhibition space. The data is then stored on Platform Future-Past’s servers and replayed in a loop on its computers. It is a “recorded moment”, “frozen” on the data servers, that could potentially replay itself forever or is waiting for someone to reactivate it. A “data center” on the deck, with its set of interfaces and visualizations screens, lets the visitors-observers follow the ongoing process of recording.

The work could be seen as an architectural proposal built on the idea of massive data production from our environment. Every second, our world produces massive amounts of data, stored “forever” in remote data centers, like old gas bubbles trapped in millennial ice.

As such, the project is attempting to introduce doubt about its true nature: would it be possible, in fact, that what is observed from the platform is already a present recorded from the past? A phantom situation? A present regenerated from the data recorded during a scientific experiment that was left abandoned? Or perhaps replayed by the machine itself ? Could it already, in fact, be running on a loop for years?

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[Banner image: fabric | ch, Platform of Future-Past, 2022, Scaffolding, projection screens, sensors, data storage, data flows, plywood panels, textile partitions, Dimensions variable.]

Event I

Beneath the Skin, Between the Machines — Series Panel

Investigating Sensoriums: Beyond Life/Machine Dichotomy

*Due to COVID-related prevention measures, this projection of the performance will take place online via CEF.

Performance projection will be played when the museum can reopen on Platform of Future-Past (2022), an environmental installation conceived by fabric | ch, studio for architecture, interaction and research, for the exhibition. 

HOW Art Museum (Shanghai) will also be temporarily closed during this period.

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About the artist

Jessica Huber works as an artist in the field of the performing arts and is also together with Karin Arnold a founding member of mercimax, a performance collective based in Zürich.

After finishing her dance studies in London, she danced for various dance companies and most of her early pieces have been dance pieces too. Though her recent work and the forms and formats she chooses, have become more diverse during the past few years. Recently she has been collaborating with the British artist and activist James Leadbitter aka the vacuum cleaner on the hope & fear project.

Jessica works with curiosity and has a special interest in the texture of relationships and in how we function as individuals and as communities in society. She regularly gives workshops to professionals and non-professionals (different social groups) and teaches as a guest tutor at the Hyperwerk in Basel (Institut for studies for Post Industrial Design – or as they call it “the place where we think about how we want to live together in the future”) and is one of two artists who are part of the newly founded dramaturgy pool of Tanzhaus Zürich. She deeply enjoys diversity and is fascinated by the many possible aesthetics of exchange and sharing.

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About the performance

Picture in the dark: Fletcher/Huber, picture daytime: Ettlin/Huber *pictures from “holding it together”: Nelly Rodriguez

Holding it together*: myself and the other is first of all an encounter between the two performers Géraldine Chollet and Robert Steijn – and the underlying questions of what binds us together and how we create intimacy, playfulness and trust by sharing rituals and treatments with each other.

Two very different and differently old bodies nestle together, doing silent rituals of gentle intimacy. They explain, apparently quite privately, how they met at a party and worked with each other – one with, one without a plan – and what this resulted in. The Dutch performer with a penchant for Shamanism and the dancer from Lausanne offer each other a song, a dance and neither shy away from deep feelings… 

“Holding it together” is a series of collaborations, performances and researches Jessica Huber created in collaboration with different artists. The first idea for ‘Holding it together’ sparked during her studio residency in Berlin in 2013. This led to a collection of ideas, approaches to movement and formats under the thematic umbrella: ‘Holding it together’. Four thematic chapters or acts stem from this period: – The Thing; The Mass; Myself; Myself & the other(s).

“Holding it together” is not only a reference to the series’ overarching theme of cooperation and the question of how we perceive and create our world, but also an announcement of the working method: At the core of this series were reflections about the aesthetics and praxis of exchange and sharing, about rituals, as well as the longing for space and time for encounter.