The Hall

The People’s Commune Assembly Hall was an iconic site for political gatherings and propaganda during China’s national collectivisation period between the 1950s and 1980s.

It witnessed the prime years of the now grannies, while it almost didn’t exist in the mind of the kids. We chose this site to organise a collective happening with villagers in Shigushan, Wuhan in summer 2023, whom we’ve been working with since 2015. Through immersive spatial projection in the now abandoned commune hall, we screened back to the village community footages of their beautiful lives and the co-created improvisations, as part of the transdisciplinary project RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING.

Almost the entire village came, transforming the commune hall from a once political site into a theatre of everyday life. This short film amplifies the inherent narrative capacity of the commune hall, through juxtaposing its physical space, the projected space and the reconstructed filmic space. Temporalities and worlds collide: the commune hall as a symbolic site for the socialist ideal, the decades of abandonment after the commune system was abolished, the start of its new life marked by the recent renovation, and a subversion of its loaded history through the collective happening. Unique to film as medium, what is reconstructed is one step out of reality but not yet into fiction, a delicate odd state that embraces the commune hall’s extraordinary inarticulacy and complexities without imposing any singular, lucid narrative. The space speaks for itself.

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The Hall
China, 2024
Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Chen Zhan, Mengfan Wang

Posted

05.Mar.2024 1026 views

Author

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng works across architecture, anthropology, and filmmaking. Her practice follows drifting bodies—from rural migrant workers to forms of water—to draw out latent relations across scales, confronting intensified social injustice and ecological crisis. Cyan was awarded the Harvard GSD’s 2023 Wheelwright Prize for TRACING SAND, two commendations from the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) President’s Awards for Research in 2018 and 2020, the Best Short Film at the Venice Architecture Film Festival (2023) and the Architecture Short Film Award at the Milano Design Film Festival (2024), all as part of RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING. Cyan’s work has been exhibited internationally, as part of Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2020-22), Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2019) and Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), among others. Cyan holds a PhD by Design from the Architectural Association and currently teaches at the Royal College of Art in London.

Posted

05.Mar.2024 1026 views

Author

Chen Zhan

Chen Zhan is an architect, anthropologist, and independent filmmaker, trained at the Architectural Association and SOAS University of London respectively. An ARB registered architect, Chen worked on various award-winning projects across scales and sectors internationally since 2011, including the Maggie’s Cancer Care Center in Leeds, UK. Since 2019, Chen has been using film as a collaborative medium to conduct long-term research-oriented projects, winning the Best Short Film at the Venice Architecture Film Festival (2023) and the Architecture Short Film Award at the Milano Design Film Festival (2024). Her projects include ‘ORCHID, BEE and I’, a fictional ethnography that reflects on personal and collective experiences of living through the climate crisis and the Covid pandemic, and ‘RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING’, a transdisciplinary endeavour that attunes to how Chinese rural migrant workers make worlds.

Posted

05.Mar.2024 1026 views

Author

Mengfan Wang

Mengfan Wang is an independent theatre director and choreographer, with training in History of Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, and Dance Studies at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz, Cologne. Seeking to explore performative expressions of ordinary people, her dance theatre practice engages middle-aged women and children through a collaborative rework of daily acts and recently focuses on ageing bodies by working with retired ballet dancers. Mengfan is selected as “Dance Hopeful (Hoffnungsträger)” by German dance magazine tanz in its yearbook 2018. Her dance works have been invited to VIE Festival Bologna, Beijing Fringe Festival, Wuzhen Theater Festival, among others. Commissioned by the Centre Pompidou and the West Bund Museum Shanghai, her latest work Narrative Fountain was shown as part of Women in Motion 2023. Mengfan’s artist residencies span across Shanghai, Berlin, Copenhagen and Zurich, including working with Theatre HORA supported by the Swiss Arts Council.