Ripple Ripple Rippling
This multisensory exhibition tells situated stories of the entangled flows of people and land around an ordinary village in China. Curated visual, sonic and bodily encounters surface hidden changes in Chinese rural homes and village landscapes that enable the floating labour force who sustain the country’s urbanisation. The exhibition also reveals how the transformative process of this work has unfolded over a decade, and reflects on its evolving methods and media of communication, which interweave architecture, anthropology, filmmaking and performance.
Ripple Ripple Rippling has been working with Shigushan village, on the outskirts of Wuhan in China, since 2015. As a site of both labour supply and resource extraction, Shigushan’s life and landscape embody the social and ecological dependences embedded within China’s urbanisation. Its villagers are part of the country’s 295 million-strong rural migrant workforce, known as the floating population. These workers go to cities to work, leaving their ageing parents and young children behind; for more than 80% of families in rural China, the middle generation is missing. From tactics of dissolving their families and floating dynamically between cities and the home village emerges a practice of ‘rippling’. That is, forming indeterminate and resilient assemblages that stretch spatially from house to territory, co-ordinate temporally from daily to multi-year cycles, and manifest as bodily dispositions in everyday life. Through a situated perspective focusing on the home village, the project attunes to how villagers make worlds, from the opportunistic reparation of scarred landscapes to networks of care that extend and transgress familial bonds.
Over the past decade, Ripple Ripple Rippling has become a living project. From architectural documentation to participant observation to performative improvisation to collective happening, the project is a long-term commitment to a place, its marginalised community and their agency, resistance and complicity, all rooted in precarity.
After a journey that has expanded outwards from architecture, the exhibition at the AA is a moment of homecoming to the place where this project originally began. A work-in-progress house foundation at 1:1 scale on Bedford Square juxtaposes a key material register of the complex social and economic conditions in the village onto this privately-owned public space in central London – all while providing a stage for performances and food-sharing as well as a living garden. The corresponding exhibits in the AA Gallery include a walk-around screening of the Ripple Ripple Rippling film trilogy, and multimedia storytelling that brings together drawings, photographs and field footage.