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Stories from Beijing

An eye painting a page of time

The project presents ten short stories telling the intimate relationship between a foreigner and the city of Beijing. Each story has explored a topic that brings back the individual to a state of peace within the accelerated, crowded and multi-sensory contemporary city. Each topic has taken place in one specific urban space of Beijing, in which sounds and moving images have been recorded to create a two-minute video, laying the grounds for a poetry written in English, translated and read in Mandarin Chinese. The whole series offers an evolution in the personal experience of the individual with the city, inviting viewers to reflect on their own stories in the urban realm of everyday life.

If you are in China, you may have to activate your VPN to watch this video.

The short film has drawn the personal condition of the enigmatic foreigner, who seeks to adjust to the city’s everyday life by reimagining himself in places and experiences while the city is, in turn, recreated through his senses. He thus becomes a Baudelairian flâneur in a post-modern era; a lonely poet with an attentive eye walking aimlessly Beijing’s streets while producing aesthetic narratives of local details. As empiricist, his body has been grasped by the city’s contrasted liveliness before analysing and representing audio-visually what is personally experienced. Although the result is an artistic piece of work, each story has underlined research topics that are worth studying widely with the social and cultural contexts in which they are set. More broadly, the way the Chinese translator has rediscovered her culture and city through the images and texts developed by the foreign author, is the sort of cultural exchange expected to create bridges between different people. At last, an analogy could be made between the first contrasted impressions experienced by a Westerner living in Beijing to those of a Chinese person living in a Western city.

Posted: February 3th, 2018

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Talk show at CGTN

On environmental protection

CGTN is the french channel owned by the predominant state broadcaster in China, CCTV. After meeting twice a journalist of the channel, it was decided to present the videos above and some of my projects as designer and teacher through a thirty-minutes long interview as part of the TV program "Quoi de neuf en Chine?'' The episode aimed to question how we understand objects and how this awareness may better help us to protect the environment. To me, this media format was a new way to share ideas in front of thousands of people and an unusual exercise of instantaneousness, when I am generally used to small-scale promotions and long-term reflections.

Posted: May 12th, 2019

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