Kiosk Newsletter Mar2010

KIOSK Koeln - Liverpool - Shanghai

MARCH 2010

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1. Chorography - Petra Johnson

3. Just before the end of the year, B6 in Köln.4. 1 square mile residency - Xu Zhifeng and Cheng Hangfeng

ISSUE No.3 chorography

Koeln Issue No. 3 - March 2010

ChorographyPetra Johnson

Recently, the latter part of 2006 and the first half of 2007 have re-appeared in my waking memory and asserted them-selves as a constructive pres-ence. In autumn 2006 I returned to Europe after a four year stay in Shanghai. During these four years I had witnessed so many changes and had changed my-self to the point that I did not find a reflection whenever I returned to Europe, that I felt I had lived for 40 odd years in China. Half a lifetime to be pre-cise. I returned, by choice, to the green, the sedate, the genteel, the rural, returned to the white middle class England I had lived in before I left. Instead of Worcestershire I choose Devon, which offered the pleasure of living with a family with small children and the wonderful op-portunity to study at Darting-ton College. Dartington College had always excited my imagi-nation: a college for experi-mental art and artists and for interdisciplinary approaches far away from the stimulations and distractions, London and New York offered. Dartington College was set up in the 1920’s

by an American heiress and her English husband. Unintention-ally, it also became a refuge for artists who had to leave their home country: Chekhov, the actor and Joost the choreog-rapher amongst others. It was where Bernard Leach, born in Hong Kong and trained in Ja-pan, wrote ‘A Potters Book’ and in doing so changed the ap-preciation of artisan-made ob-jects in England, giving them a status that could equal that of artist-made objects.I was bleary eyed by that past and found the present riddled with institutional compromise and inward-looking pre-occu-pations. The buildings and the facilities stood witness to an utopia realized for a short span of time: one magnificent build-ing, fallen into disrepair, had been boarded up; the modern-ist villa built for the head teach-er had been turned into an ar-chive and museum; medieval Dartington Hall itself had be-come a hotel, a sought after lo-cation for wedding parties and conferences. But within the old and the newly built dance, mu-sic and theatre studios some


of the teaching staff continued in the spirit of that past com-mitted to offer experimental platforms and opportunities to those who dared to commit themselves in turn.I had come to seek firm ground under my feet but within two months the ground begun to move again. Insider informa-tion that Dartington College was planning to close by 2010 had been leaked to a local newspaper. So, after all, this was not going to be my resting ground as I had hoped. There was much at Dartington that intrigued me; there was also much the new me found embarrassingly euro-centric and - yet more painfully alien-ating - precociously English. I struggled with both. I regis-tered them but could not find a place for them amongst my concerns. They merely seemed to add fuel to the blazing re-verse culture shock. They had a whiff of a past that was far, painfully far distant and yet within them there was a scent of future, utterly unshaped. I re-alized how much the language had changed during my four

years absence and felt almost illiterate once again, not for lack of vocabulary as in China, but because familiar words had acquired unfamiliar meanings.

One example of the “preco-ciously” English works I regis-tered during this time of reverse culture shock was a short refer-ence to a performance by Mike Pearson. I read, he had gone to the village of his birth and done a performance walk for and with the inhabitants, which included his mother and some of his schoolmates. It was on the face of it such a simple and matter of course activity that to call it art and write a book about it seemed indulgent and only possible on self-obsessed European ground, whilst the other face of this Janus head evoked fear in me, gave me a very violent nudge and inten-sified my deep sense of unrest. Like a splinter this work stayed with me and it is only now – in the context of KIOSK/Xiaomai-bu – that I am less intimidated as well as more appreciative of its bravado. And that I can be-gin to engage with it.


Mike Pearson works with the concept of chorography, choro means place and graphy means writing. Chorography attempts to find ways of a place articulat-ing itself. Chorography used to be a taught subject alongside geography: the latter required the skills of mathematicians and chorography required the skills of artists. As geography became an accepted subject matter within the humanities, chorography faded into obliv-ion. Chorography is about under-standing and presenting the uniqueness of a place, a local-ity, a region outside the geo-graphical frame.

Accordingly Mike Pearson de-veloped a set of questions, which I have adapted for KI-OSK/Xiaomaibu

How are kiosks lived on, in and through?How are kiosks and environ-ment revealed, imagined, ex-perienced, contested, animat-ed and represented?How can performance/events inform, extend and enhance

engagement with kiosk and environment?How can performance illumi-nate attachments, meanings and emotions that resonate within and from kiosks ¬ visual, aural and tactile?What strategies and forms of performance exposition does working with kiosk¬ as medi-um and scene of expression¬ inspire and necessitate?What is the life of kiosk and environment and how is it per-formed?

Here the space of “KIOSK” is approached as the product of a set of social conventions, de-sires and memories, practices, and specific performances whose architectural realization within urban form is treated as secondary to those processes and practices rather than as their container.

In this manner Kiosk can be a stage for temporally bound performances presented to a local audience as well as an audience that has a very dif-ferent set of social conventions



and memories. KIOSK can be a space of chemistry rather than engineering, any outcome can-not be more than partial:

The aim, whether it is recog-nized or not, is to construct something new out of old, to connect what may appear dis-similar in order to achieve new insights and understanding. Pearson/Shanks

And/or

It may become a place which returns to us the ability to ex-change experiences, an ability Walter Benjamin writes, that has been taken from us.

To illustrate the above points I finish this article with a short summary of Mike Pearson’s performance „Bubbling Tom“, a performance made at that most disturbing place ‚at home’.The performance took place on the 25th of April 2000. It starts in one street of the vil-lage, Mike Pearson was born in, at a spot of which Mike Pear-son has a 47-year old photo, showing a three-year old Mike

Pearson licking an icecream. He re-embodies himself at a different scale and time in the same location. The audience are local people and some visi-tors from London. This is a one-off performance. It lasts two hours and during these two hours ten places are visited, all located within one square mile, the square mile of child-hood. The audience have been given little booklets, each loca-tion has two pages devoted to it with pictures of objects and images of the 1950s, there is a map. Pearson uses the loca-tions as mnemonic devices and intersperes recollections with some theoretical reflections by Bachelard, D.J. Williams and Georges Perec, thereby bring-ing in another world into the village. He also allows/invites interspersions from his audi-ence as well as informal con-versations. Not only his mother corrects his recollections with comments like, „No, that was your brother who did that.“ The journey or walk passes landmarks, personal and bio-graphic, that one ‚cannot tell by looking’. And the performance



text spoken in front of these landmarks evokes memories in the audience that become part of the performance. There is a sharing of nostalgia accompa-nied by a subversion, an aspect that allows feelings of loss and change to move beyond re-gret. The performance acts as a catalyst: stirring up memories, mixing the materiality of place with the ephemerality of per-formance, allowing personal stories to surface, allowing ex-changes of experiences and in doing so creating a communal-ity. The tenth and last location of the walk is a stream. Mike Pear-son stands in the middle of it and says,’They say if you drink from Bub-bling Tom you’ll always come back. I don’t think I ever did......probably because I was never quite sure where it was.’ ‚All that is left then is to have a big argu-ment as to where it really is.’

And the performance ends with his audience searching and pointing and offering ex-pert opinion.

The performance demonstrates a strategy that I consider help-ful and inspiring in the plan-ning of the viedo streaming events, that bring together one or two Koelner from specific walks of life with two Shanghai-nese from the same walk of life in order to exchange work and life experiences. These events require moderation/translation and here the role of the artist is paramount in preparing a map for the event and setting a stage as well as guiding the flow of the conversation. These events are catalysts for layering stories as well as making por-traits by other means.



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Instant HomeGerburg Stoffel and her pro-posed intervention


... in “the wild”....

view from the inside

view from the outside

Just before the end of the year, B6 visited Köln.B6 has been interviewed and featured by BBC TV, NPR Radio, CCTV, DragonTV and reviewed in magazines like Time, The Wire, Vision, Milk, 1626, and many more. He’s also composed music for films and commercials (Nike).


B6 is China’s most prolific and respected independent mod-ern music producer and DJ.

Hailing from Shanghai, this 27-year-old maverick is a multi-tal-ented electronic music pioneer, DJ, renowned graphic artist, and co-founder of Neocha.com and the Antidote parties

As a teenager, B6 started his own independent record label (Isolation), and composed crit-ically-acclaimed experimental sound art, ambient, and post-rock albums while also pro-ducing sound and designing album covers for various alter-native music acts on the main-land. B6’s graphic works have been exhibited in museums in the UK, Europe, and North America.

In the years since, B6’s produc-tions have explored a variety of genres, from synth-pop to IDM to breakcore and drum and bass, and in 2006 released a 6-CD box set of his early works. In 2007, B6 teamed up with singer JJay to complete a ra-dio-friendly but cutting-edge

synth-pop album called IGO “Synth Love”, released on Uni-versal Music HK.

In November 2008, B6 released a new solo album -- B6 “Post Haze” on China’s Modern Sky Records. “Post Haze” shows a new maturity in B6’s music, with precision programming, dance-floor rocking rhythms and glitch-happy beats. Start-ing with smooth, atmospheric minimalism, moving into mind-bending tech-house, then a bit of bangin’ techno, “Post Haze” promises to be a landmark re-lease out of China’s developing independent music scene.

In 2009, B6’s “Post Haze” second edition is released in Europe and has received great reviews by the European electronic mu-sic community. He also worked with Ars-numerica, a renowned French art organization this June to finish a multimedia project. B6’s next stop in Eu-rope will be Germany, Belgium, Denmark and Switzerland in this coming November.

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1 square mile artist residencyLondon November/Decem-ber 2009

London Issue No. 3 - March 2010

Xu Zhifeng, known as Shaw, on his project Homewalk 1mile2

Shaw began by comparing his home city of Shanghai with Waltham Forest describing how he came to develop his project: Homewalk 1mile2 Waltham Forest Code 4053.

Inspired by the Olympic Rings and residing in a host borough, Shaw’s project involved defin-ing a circle of houses. Shaw’s ‘ring’ highlighted the individu-al and personal lives within this area. Working with local artists he solicited residents to par-ticipate in written recordings of their lives and the raising of white balloons attached to their chimney pots. Annie Chip-case, local ecologist, Frances Bowman, delivery co-ordinator and Lea O’Loughlin, Shaw’s in-ternational artist host at ACME were also present.

and Chen Hangfeng”s bubble machine, bubbles are gener-ated by a drip.

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Homewalk 1mile2 Waltham Forest Code 4053.

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Kiosk Newsletter Mar2010