FUTURE PROJECTS
carry trade
‘China property downturn spreads to trophy office buildings …
“Rents and occupancy rates will be under continuous pressure.” More tenants in Shanghai’s Grade A offices terminated leases than signed them during the quarter ending in June, the first time this has happened since 2015, according to Savills, a British real estate services company, which identified 7,445 square metres of vacant space in such buildings.”’
– FT 11 Sept 2023
i move to china to rent out my flat to chinese people and pay low rent in beijing/shanghai commercial property while making work about transfers of language and currency in the former office space turned auto-residency
i make friends in beijing/shanghai thru learning language etc
the cash sustains the project inc the marking i am not being paid for (yet) by college /employer back in collapsing uk
when i return to the UK i will bring back information about clean water, safe housing and educational buildings, among other resources, and also about parallel versions of the same catastrophe.
comparing two economies in decline, and two (or more) populations in struggle, i will look for a parallax or third image that at least implies something other than multipolar dystopia and poly crisis.
i will use the economic advantage gained thru the bi/more localisation to generate synergies and opportunities for further exchange and also generate a paper trail/product in terms of artwork probably involving music and collab on location in beiing/shanghai
i will also use this to go investigate (art) teaching and making opportunities in the region
note: it will not be clear whether or not my occupation of the commercial property is fictional or ‘real’, but it will be structurally integral to the project, like autoclaved concrete to a UK school
See:
https://www.ft.com/content/a5978660-f0a0-452f-a745-74515622b44e
Yingwen shanzhai: the burning book
proposal for a tiktok-opera (2021-)
焚書坑竹帛煙銷帝業虛，
關河空鎖祖龍居。
坑灰未冷山東亂，
劉項原來不讀書。
As the smoke from burning bamboo and silk clears, the empire is weakened.
The Hangu Pass and the Yellow River guard the domain of Qin Shi Huang in vain.
Before the ashes in the burning pit turned cold, a riot had already started in Shandong Province.
As it turned out, Liu Bang and Xiang Yu could not read.
– THE BOOK BURNING PIT, Zhang Jie, 618 - 907 A.D.
Shares in Chinese food delivery giant Meituan have fallen sharply after its boss reportedly shared a 1,000-year-old poem on social media. ...
– BBC news, 2021 A.D.
5 Voices from different social locations and of different timbres and tones (the 5 pitches, the five or fewer estates?) each perform the same mandarin text to form a microtonal music derived from the language, and the social context (the 4 furnaces?).
the piece will engage workers (and the sounds of labour) at every stratum of the host project (and beyond) to create a Rashomon like multi-perspectival musical gestalt in which everyone sings the same words but means different things.
The conflicting inflections of western NGOs, Fintech CEOs, the state, and the employees of the CEOs, will constitute the musical and social material of the composition.
The 5 tones of mandarin and the radicals and characters of ancient and contemporary chinese (& social media) are the linguistic and sonic units (morphemes and phonemes; signifers and the burning pit’s signifieds) out of which a Brechtian lehrstueck will be constructed.
Charles Ives meets Lao Tzu + Bertolt Brecht:
Said the boy: ‘He learnt how quite soft water, by attrition
Over the years will grind strong rocks away.
In other words, that hardness must lose the day’