2011年5月18日至2011年6月5日
18 May – 5 June 2011

“大陆漂流.中国”活动将众多的艺术家，策展人，理论家，与活动家召集到一起，共同探索当 代地理政治转化对于公共框架与亲密生存 空间的影响。在一周的时间里，本活动将“漂”在北京，尝试将抽象分析（经济，社会学，都市生活研究，美学等等）直接导入不同的艺术实践当中。通过报告，工 作坊，讨论会与实地考察等方式，我们希望自己能在闹市与乡间的穿梭中构建一个充满欢乐，感觉试验，偶遇与思考的游历方式。

The Continental Drift China brings together artists, curators, theorists, and activists to explore the impacts that current geopolitical transformations are having on the public frameworks and intimate environments of existence. For one week, the roving seminar will drift through Beijing, endeavouring to bring abstract analysis (economics, sociology, urbanism, aesthetics, etc.) into direct contact with situated projects. By way of presentations, a workshop, discussion sessions and site visits, the project provides a movement through space thriving on conviviality, perceptual experimentation, unexpected encounters and informed travel in both metropolitan and rural settings.

活动安排 SCHEDULE

欲知所列每项活动的细节，请看本安排表下的具体内容。请注意不是所有的活动都在同一场所，活动地址安排如下：
For detailed descriptions of each of the events listed, please see below. Note that not all events are at the same location; addresses are listed accordingly.

【 合辑 Selections 】底特律音乐人类学赏析，王念华主讲  /  an evening of musical anthropology led by Dan S. WANG

5月19日，周四，晚上7点开始
地点：家作坊，东城区交道口北二条8号
Thursday, 19 May, 19.00
location：HomeShop, Dongcheng District, Jiaodaokou Beiertiao 8

【 杨先让 YANG Xianrang 】（艺术家， 曾任中央美术学院民间美术系主任）讲座  /  a Talk with Professor YANG Xianrang, artist and former head of the Central Academy of Fine Arts Folk Arts and Crafts department

5月21日，周六早上10点半开始
地点：家作坊，东城区交道口北二条8号
Saturday, 21 May, 10.30
location：HomeShop, Jiaodaokou Beiertiao 8

【西遊计划 Journey West 】艺术假扮旅行社简单开张  /  A “Journey West” Travel Agency performative soft opening

5月21日，周六下午4点开始
地点：钟楼湾胡同41号
Saturday, 21 May, 16.00
location：41 Zhonglouwan Hutong (next door to The Drum and Bell Bar)

【《北二条小报》工作坊 Beiertiao Leaks self-publishing workshop】

5月22－23日，周六到周一，早上10点开始直到印刷完毕
地点：家作坊，东城区交道口北二条8号
Sunday & Monday, 22-23 May, 10.00 until the presses are hot
location：HomeShop, Jiaodaokou Beiertiao 8

从5月23日“大陆漂流”继续向武汉与重庆漂流，6月4日返回北京。如果你对我们下一步的旅行感兴趣，请e-mail垂询： lianxi[圈A]homeshop[点]org[点]cn。
From the 23rd of May until the 4th of June, the Drift continues on to Wuhan and Chongqing before rounding back up in Beijing. If you are interested to continue with us on this leg of the journey, please inquire: lianxi[at]homeshop[dot]org[dot]cn.

【 “大陆漂流.中国” 总结论坛  Continental Drift China Final Forum】“哪里哪里” 艺术空间将与大陆漂流参加者联合举办一个开放总结论坛。更多的详情稍候发布。 /  The Where Where Exhibition Space in Caochangdi will host a final forum with China Drift participants open to the public. More details to be announced.

6月5日，周日，下午3点
地点：“哪里哪里” 艺术空间
朝阳区草场地村319-1艺术东区A区内
Sunday, 5 June, 15.00
location：Where Where Exhibition Space
No. 319-1, East End Art Zone A, Caochangdi

—–
本次大陆漂流活动由 “我们家” 青年自治中心，“家作坊”，“哪里哪里”策展联盟，与“罗盘”（美国中西部激进 文化走廊）等组织共同合作举办。
The Continental Drift China is developed by Desireè Youth Autonomy Center, HomeShop and the Where Where Curatorial Collective, in conjunction with Compass (of the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor).

豆瓣同城活动 Douban event page：www.douban.com/event/13954395/

更多关于“大陆漂流.中国”的参加者信息，继续读… For more information about participants of the Continental Drift China, please continue reading.

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all photos by 曲一箴 Twist QU*

If we had not been able to come closer to an understanding of affect at the reading club meeting, it came to me again in a recent text by another Brian (“The half-life of disaster“), where somehow the descriptive traversing of scales felt familiar, and of course it can hit us with as much impact as watching a slow-motion montage of the year in review, or Olympic triumphs, or yes, the touching moments and heroes of disaster. We should be immune already perhaps, cynical viewers whose forms of belief have decayed parallel to these half-lives, and yet even at standstill, reduced to its barest linguistic denominators, it could still be possible to induce a notion of affective scales on a billboard covering an urban construction site: “Grandpa lazing in the sun. Boys dancing hip-hop. Businessman checking e-mail. Woman carrying shopping bag.” She was kind of pissed off about this, about all that it left out or pinned down too characteristically in succinct world view, but it seemed also something more than ‘trace’ in a collective reading on media. This is an affect of the kind that Michael mentions, “understood as the embodiment of certain codes, to be read and embodied by a particular community”. Such embodiment is a continuous training, like watching these disasters in constant cycle, like urbanity itself. We learn to traverse the levels, moving from horror and shock at grand scale to human warmth and its accompaniments in the everyday heroes and miniature miracles that soothe a constant, half-toned fear.

Taking distance can occur in both directions, towards macro-scale world views or into the safety of the small moments in a day to day. What Massumi claims as a ‘trace-form anticipation’ singularly and collectively describes this back and forth motion; it is a kind of subjective being-in-motion that typifies our here and now condition. To make a hero of our friend A W W abroad stresses the silence nearby, it casts scales of individual activism helplessly against nameless foreboding forces at the state realm, naïvely paralleled by his name being coded “Love the future”. Larger and stronger pursuits of activism in the last years (in education, in the art world, the Middle East, the mid-West…) echo, or are symptomatic of such “affective conversion circuits”, but there remains to be seen what “alter-” could possibly step out of it. Should affect move out of affect? What lies outside of scale itself? The movements seem to encompass everything already, like fantastic ideas kept to oneself, like capitalism’s neverending ever in sight, like half-lives in decay.

—–
* there was a thought at the beginning of writing this post that these photos bore some relation to the things i was going to say, but the distancing ended up there. there is a lot of ambivalent feeling in their transmission, but they speak of a relation…

Happy Friends met on January 12th in the evening in HomeShop to discuss Brian Holmes’ “The Affectivist Manifesto”. Despite the particular viewpoint with which he begins his manifesto (regarding the 20th century as a monolithic period obsessed with medium), it is rather ambiguous how the text merits the “manifesto” in its title. (…)

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Dear Happy Friends,
Happy New Year.
With our passage to the year 2011, we renew our call to meeting.
We will begin softly with a text by “The Affectivist Manifesto”, by American-born theorist, writer and translator Brian Holmes. As it is quite brief, the text is simply included in the message body below.

The meeting will take place on January 12th at 5:30pm at HomeShop.

“But intimacy is still an unpredictable force, a space of gestation and therefore a wellspring of gesture, the biological spring from which affect drinks.” -Brian Holmes

Participants are encouraged to bring contributions to a definition of “affect”; what is its promise? How and why to engage it in the manner of a manifesto? Is this not the area colonized by the consumption puppet-masters?

We look forward to your presence.

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Below is an attempted translation of an earlier post, quotations from a comment in response to a post about a conversation.

There is nothing less passive than the act of fleeing… reading group day 10, photo by caleb waldorf

The thing to remember while crossing the threshold is that the process of world-making does demand the maintenance of suspended spaces of inquiry, even as it presses toward effective changes in the way that you sustain your material existence:

With whom do I create a world? What will it be made of? How will we maintain it? Where will we find the gazes that we humans need to keep doing whatever it is that we do? How to raise our own gazes past personal satisfactions to an activity that can attain the bracing and tragic dimensions of a real world? Can we or should we bring along any symbolic or material supplies from the richly appointed illusions we’ve just left? Is a politics necessary: do we somehere have to stand and fight? Is a counter-institution necessary: do we have to set up objective structures to start sharing whatever we have learned with people we don’t know? And how to keep this whole quixotic enterprise from failing, or drifting by inertial necessity back to the established and symbolically stingy formats of what you are calling the artworld?

–Brian Holmes, responding to Quitting: a conversation with Alexander Koch on the paradoxes of dropping out

what i like about him is his ability to talk optimistically about these issues without oversimplifying, going so far as to even near the poetic in drawing out the complexities… when i just felt paralysed…

Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2008 01:38:09 +0100
From: Brian Holmes
Subject: Re: <nettime> Brits in hock–or, Atlas shrugged again
To: nettime-l@kein.org
Message-ID: <200803290138.10202.brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”iso-8859-1″

On Friday 28 March 2008 22:06:41 Dan S. Wang wrote:

> The reform era could also be called the Era of Devolution, meaning, while the central govern-
> ment maintains controls over national economic levers, the on-the-ground autonomy of the
> provincial, prefectural, and municipal governments has never been greater. It is not really a
> surprise that the greatest explosion of industry and commerce happened in the south, faraway
> from the oversight and political baggage of Beijing, where local layers of government can act
> with independence. Though the usual political machinations figured into his ascension, it is
> also not suprising that the period of great acceleration corresponded with the rise of Jiang
> Zemin, the former mayor of Shanghai, a man who learned to govern a city by always looking
> out for its own local interests.

This is getting good! When Dan uses his lived experience to bring in the micro-political play of influence and constraint on both sides of the US/China divide, then the discussion becomes truly interesting — because we’re finally getting beyond the massiveness of the global division of labor. The big trap is to consider nations or regions as unitary subjects, arrayed against each other in the global ring, when in fact they are seething molecular cauldrons of differences and strategies and needs and aspirations whose dynamics then enter into reciprocal (though usually unconscious) relations, via trade and money but also through immigration, media, communication, cultural motifs, educational processes, vastly complex and specific realities that never stop intersecting. What we have been trying to get at with Continental Drift is precisely the imbrication of scales: intimate, urban, national, continental, global. It’s characteristic of contemporary societies to find all them all intermeshing simultaneously in every possible combination of intensities, and though it’s dauntingly complex at times, it’s also just world society, the everyday experience. To make sense of the patterns is to anticipate the possibility of a new democratic politics, even across the huge gaps that are set up by the global divisions.

Something really interesting in Dan’s post, that people might not understand right off the bat, is this idea that the Reform era has been an age of Devolution, i.e. delegation of central government power to localities. The Chinese state appears monolithic, because it has kept the control of mediated appearance, i.e. CCTV and the People’s Daily and the Great Firewall. But that plus the army and the police are the major functions that made the neoliberal cut. The thing is that reform-style development was not carried out in a centralized way, through the discipline of planning, but instead by ceding the rights to lease out property to local collectivities (villages, cities, provinces), and then requiring them to meet certain targets with the resources at their disposal. This, as Friedrich Hayek taught, was a much more quick and efficient way generate and apply information, and thereby, to move straight into the classic capitalist contradictions! What this means once again is that the very motor of development — in this case, local initiative — makes geographical and social harmony impossible to simply legislate from the center. It can’t be done, because the government has simply given up authority, in exchange for unlocking the local productivity. And that is very much the trap of the neoliberal governance model, not only in China.

What that means is that the molecular processes of capitalism — on the one hand, those fiercely competitive battles among all the individual “China prices,” and on the other, the repercussions of all those individual reticences to consume that are about to be felt in the West — cannot be very easily controlled or compensated for under the neoliberal model. And as soon as the “self-organized” Hayekian initiatives of structured finance cease to ensure trans-continental coordination, what you’re gonna have is plain old chaos, almost random pressures and aleatory interplays of influences. What can be done, by those of us involved in culture and communication, is to provoke a little more awareness of this chaotic molecularity, to retrace more paths of the kind that Dan has taken the care to point out, and in this way, to make more people realize that on the other end of the commodity-chains there are also human beings in difficult situations. To the extent that long-term perturbations really are set off by the housing crash and its repercussions I think this kind of micro-narrative can be a positive contribution, one entirely within the powers of relatively ordinary people, particularly if they speak a couple languages and have a networked camera or keyboard. Let’s all try to make the chaos a bit more interesting!

best, BH

haven’t read this piece yet, saving it for the airplane, i think, but i quoted him before about Lin Yilin and think he is pretty sharp!

[Brian Holmes’ “One World, One Dream”]

Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:42:16 -0800
From: Brian Holmes
Subject: Re: <nettime> Lin Yilin
To: nettime-l@kein.org
Message-ID: <474CF1A8.5090401@wanadoo.fr>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

It’s excellent to read more about Lin Yilin, whose Documenta piece, “Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road” (1995) was a great discovery for me, one of the best pieces in the show. I’m just returning from Southern China, and I visited the Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou where Lin recently did an exhibition, more or less hidden away amidst a vegetable market in an outlying district not far from the “Love-In Mall” (just another typical shopping center overflowing with consumerism). I’m extremely curious about the Chinese art scene and I don’t quite know what to make of it. David Garcia’s remarks are a good starting point:

> What is not much commented on however is the way that
> the ‘vector’ of the visual arts has functioned in ways that
> seem to short circuit some of the restrictions on
> expression in the general Chinese media. Once again we
> see how the fragile claims to political relevance of
> contemporary art is based on the way that it is able to
> articulate certain conceptions of human freedom. In the
> case of Chinese art these freedoms have been able to arise
> in the context of small locally embedded audiences
> without the benefit of accompanying institutional              > structures, galleries, critics, journals, curators, museums.

Those who went to Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves at the ZKM a few months ago could see an amazing example of this short-circuiting by an artist named Liu Wei, who braved the absolute prohibition of contemporary Chinese society by going out to the campus of Beijing University on j-u-n-e f-o-u-r, t-w-o t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d a-n-d f-i-v-e — the 16th anniversary of the T-A-M S-q-u-a-r-e m-a-s-s-a-c-r-e — and asking people, “What day is it today?” What the video shows over and over, with only one real exception, is people breaking off, falling silent, dodging away, usually with a panic look in their eyes as the process of self-censorship kicks in, plus a confused embarrassment at having it filmed. To get how impressive this is, you have to realize that one of the most famous images in the world, the one of a man stopping a column of tanks on their way to Tiananmen square, is largely unknown in mainland China and of course, strictly censored from the Internet. Upon seeing this video I assumed that the author of “A Day to Remember” was living in exile, but no, he lives and works in Beijing (even if, not surprisingly, the piece does not show up among the videos listed on his website, www.lwstudio.com). It is as though critical art, which for almost twenty years could only exist in Western exile, were finally returning to China. In my travels and research I have come across a rather short list of currently active artists, mostly from the 1990s, who powerfully and corrosively explore the kind of limited freedom that Lin Yinlin talks about in David’s interview. The work that interests me corresponds very much to the description that Lin gives of contemporary Chinese art in general, and of the Big Tail Elephant group in particular: “It appeared as a nondescript monster which, like present day cities in China, abruptly came into existence. Driven by the insane and irrational consumerism and hedonism permeating China’s cities, people have been continuously in a state of unaccountable enjoyment, utter ignorance of the future and an excitement aroused by fierce competition. Within such a scenario, the Big Tail Elephant’s art, covering urban issues such as urban development, consumerism, traffic, population and sex culture, is inevitably imprinted with marks of the times.” The video of the artist maneuvering across Lin He Road, sheltering from the traffic behind a temporary wall of breeze blocks which he displaces brick by brick to make the crossing, takes on an incredibly vivid and paradoxical meaning when you see the tremendous sprawl of the new cities, choked with traffic and polluted, bordering on insanity but at the same time gleaming with luxury. The work could be a metaphor of an entire society moving decisively ahead under the cover of the very force of over-development that is about to become life-threatening, but at the same time, that is still the only game in town, the one you’ve got to play to be part of anything. There is a kind of wild and violent lucidity to the best of contemporary Chinese art, that asks for a response, for a dialogue, for a pragmatically critical engagement with the present.

That’s not all that’s going on, however, and if interesting art was definitely able to arise during the 90s in locally embedded situations without all the usual art paraphernalia, those days are gone today. What you see now is an explosion of art, everywhere in the Chinese cities, far beyond the biennials and the attention of the Western curators. In Beijing and Shanghai, a new museum is being built everywhere you look, there are more galleries than artists, and amidst the hustle and bustle of sales it is extremely difficult to get at the meaning of anything. Everyone will tell you that there is no difference between artists and businessmen in China: Ai Wei Wei, famous for his bicycle installations and for bringing a thousand Chinese visitors to the Documenta, is basically operating as a land developer on the outskirts of Beijing, and he is no exception, art and real estate are very closely linked, while the buzzword of “creative industries” becomes omnipresent in the coastal cities. The fate of Beijing’s Factory 798 / Dashanzi Art District is emblematic: after less than five years of tremendously interesting “locally embedded” activity, it has escaped being razed for new apartment complexes only to become a tourist attraction and luxury consumption environment under the watchful eye of the state, which is trying to figure out how to tolerate some contemporary art and prove to the rest of the world that Olympic China is no longer a land that exiles its dissidents. At the same time, it’s obviously a highly authoritarian state that censors the Internet very severely and clamps down immediately on any kind of protest, except the ones that somebody decides should be tolerated for reasons that can change tomorrow or in the next five minutes. So the degree of schizophrenia is impressive, and the apparent lack of any overt critical or even searching discussion in public is rather depressive — even if we are also getting used to that here in the USA…

As Lin himself says:

> the rapidly popular art market also brings the trial to the
> artists. Chinese contemporary artists take the risk to
> change the isolated status suddenly to become brand
> name stars. If Chinese contemporary art cannot develop a
> particular theory, then ultimately they would only be
> expensive craftwork for this period of history.

The kind of theory that Lin is talking about will be written in Chinese, to address the complexities of a national/imperial situation involving 1.3 billion people. Nobody but the Chinese artists and intellectuals can do that, and I suspect that as the construction and consumption boom tops out, enough people will become disgusted with the prevailing euphoria and greed to start forming the kinds of marginal circles and semi-secret languages that are needed. However, what gets translated on the transnational level still matters, particularly in an age when communication across borders has become so much more fluid. The blockbuster concept shows and facile biennials fit perfectly into the ambient meaninglessness. Careful work with specific artists, filmmakers and intellectuals who are given enough time and space to develop their perceptions and ideas can probably make a real contribution, both to a wider understanding of China’s situation in the world, and to the more intense and detailed debates unfolding within the country. Thanks to David and the people at Visual Foreign Correspondent for this material from Lin Yinlin, shackled to himself amidst the overwhelming cacophony of urban China.

best, Brian

[apologies to Brian and all, oh the irony, but this text has been encoded a bit here because i don’t want our website to get X’d in China… we’re in Beijing, too… a response to this mail is posted here.]