2024.01.21 Sunday 14:00
Location
Mao Space, No. 29, Lane 56, West Jianguo Rd, Huangpu District, Shanghai, China
Speaker: Mao Chenyu
Against the backdrop of the Anthropocene era, the last paddy on Earth collapses upon the sprawling ruin arching over the sea at the mouth of the Yangtze River. The Paddy in Paddyfilm unfolds in the residency project at the MadeIn Art Museum on Chongming Island, narrating a human-centric Anthropocene story with an accelerating plot. The survival of the paddy marks the final vestige of dignity in the humanized national apparatus. In “our” interim existence, the narrative offered by Earth, this celestial body, consists of incidental landscapes, chance vegetation, and the temporary stepping stones we hope to continue treading upon. The transient scene of the last collapsing paddy prompts us to question our present forms of existence, and the diverse forms through which we can endure, echoing gestures of departure-launching.
Mao Chenyu lives and works in Shanghai, and is the founder of Paddyfilm. Since 2003,he works around the area of Dongting Lake Watershed, known as Paddyfilm. In 2012 Mao founded the experimental social platform Paddyfilm-farm in Hunan, which investigates and analyses rural societies in China.Thirty mu of paddy field has been transformed into a self-sufficient farming system which nurtures the linguistic and film practices of Paddyfilm. In 2015, in opposition to the drastic transformation of rural societies in China, Mao has set up a private Elaphurus Davidianus University(EDU) within Paddyfilm’s farm,and has carried out social research and education as a kind of institutional practice aimed at the new formation of rural social subjects and their relation with modern knowledge production.
VORTEX, launched by the MACA in Shanghai in 2022, is an art and cultural salon in the form of lecture performances occurring once or twice every month. The programme calls for non-institutionalised artistic and academic production in which contemporary art practitioners and scholars get to explore cross-disciplinarily the issues of the macro or micro, the global or local, the collective or individual. VORTEX, hence, is where you spin in the whirlpool of spontaneous whims and intuitive approaches represented by individual research and enquiries. Being present here at VORTEX, you are experiencing versatile forms of lecture performances that experiment with new mechanisms and methodologies.
