Topics: [Harold's Video Blog]
Mantlepiece
I am beginning to settle into Nanling and village way of life and time suddenly seems to be slipping away. The people are the real charm of this village and it’s impossible not to warm to the generosity and openness of the folk here.
I am meeting many locals who are helping me to get to know Nanling and how to best make use of myself here, getting amongst it you could say is a real pleasure. Their stories are making a clearing for this initially seemingly impenetrable diverse and disparate new town jigsaw. They will help me weave my video footage into a history that could sit in the larger scheme of destination museum in the future; for locals to connect with a certain identity of Nanling and for visitors to consume something of the heart of the locality other than largest waterfall. An interchange on both parts is necessary if tourism is to work here and Nanling is to begin to recognise moves needed to offer a little more than unvocalised aspirations. An updated powerpoint is necessary.
My mid term thinking is to develop relationships with a few people I think I may be able to work along side and introduce one villager to the other, today I brought a farmer and peanut oil worker together in discussion and they both took time to consider the ideas being raised. I am relating my thoughts about packaging and personalising their produce to add value and try to go beyond the level of pure need to thinking further about teaming with others skills and crafts that may help their sales (wish no 1; more money) and also impart quite literally themselves through the exterior ostentation/subtlety of product packaging for something quite other than plastic fantastic. Despite being devoid of any traditional craft in these parts due to pre-fab short history, I am beginning to see scope and connections possible between certain people and trades I am encountering. I also intend to follow a more personal path with one or two perhaps who could really help me and me them.
Long term I am testing the water with what I would consider as quite an all encompassing reciprocal chess move for someone who has never left the province for a parallel Grizedale on the other side of the world. What a chance that could offer! Soundings out are necessary in terms of pragmatics and cultural cold feet.
Yesterday I could not find my savant/'hello welcome!' dotty man but instead spent an afternoon with his neighbour- a 73 year old female ex-logger who following tangerines and tea proceeded to accompany me and introduce at slipper pace to five of her friends. One was a doubled over 86 year old who had a stalwart memory and fiery voice, showing me her leg which had suffered from an explosion in the 60’s during her past as a miner here(a lot of gesturing going on). She was unhappy with how she had not received any medical attention for a while despite her services and loyalty. After, she chaperoned me to the other half of the abode opposite (kitchen/lounge) where mah jong regulars appeared to chew the fat over daily meanderings. I then enjoyed some sticky rice Buddhist style with her pensioner friends who sat fixated watching a karaoke style Buddhist song on VCD. Between singing each word they tell me that there are seven of them in Nanling who are vegan and adhere to the way. I am looking at the central wall play of a Mao poster as the son of the near amputee explains how I am not to show footage of him showing me a red identity cover with a photo of his father who passed away recently after working may years in the steel industry. It’s not difficult to want to call everyone your family here despite their different jobs and physical corners of the village, it’s the way your embraced with open arms and you try and munch on the preserved dry fruit tucked into your hand.
Your rooted though quite quickly by co-ordination hieroglyphics of Scottish dancing practice on the grounds of the Orange hotel and a fond farewell to Adam as he faces his travels back to Blighty. I better get my body clock in sync soon though, it’s 3am and I am still getting used to late meals and a lots of irresistible food.
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Today we met with the people from the women’s dance group who were also the leaders of the workers union and were also the government birth control officers for the village. Obviously I showed then the pictures of my four children and despite the cooing that ensued over the 20 month old twins, they were keen to emphasise that should I procreate so actively over here I would be fined 100,000 Yuan and loose my job.
We’re keen to involve them in our proposed mini festival for the village on the 17th, so have agreed to meet up with them on Thursday night to show us their dance moves, on the condition that Harold shows them some hip hop moves and we teach them a morsel or two of Scottish country dancing.
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5th May
I have been following the blog to get a feel for what you are doing and seeing there and have been trying to figure out what could be worth adding from a sedentary london position - partly I find it difficult because the internet diary format isnt something i feel very familiar with if even slightly wary of and partly because 'experience from a distance' doesn't even come close and feels too abstract, also Im sure you are discussing everything within the group over and over and there must be a point where you just want to get on with it - having said that I have been enjoying reading everybody's voices coming together and forming, slowly but surely something of a picture. it sounds like there is a new wave of optimism in this second lot of posts too, which is encouraging.
I agree, to install a 'model provincial museum' would be pointless - i think (whatever it will be) will have to be an open structure, maybe more something like a lab or workshop with different outcomes, which at a later stage can maybe develop an idea of archive that can link back to lawson park and/or london, not something that is inserted there?
any project I would think will have to start from a common denominator as a starting point hopefully with the result of something unknown to all 'positions'. i think all these ideas about being useful to something or someone have to start with your own curiosity, enthusiasm or interest (which normally brings with it the benefit of a certain 'expertise' anyway) not through a moral imperative of figuring out what is good for someone, which easily traps one in a missionary role and perpetuates a certain binary structure and pidgeon-holing on both sides or conformity of ideas - i think this is true for anywhere or any situation that involves communities that you enter as an outsider. partly, i think it is important to recognize difference with the aim of understanding it and not feed the myth of a globalized cohesive understanding which is often one-way anyway in terms of who is being interpreted.
cooking and food seems to be one such possible starting point from what you are saying market stalls and farming in relation to lawson park - on one level, certainly at this stage about enjoying the place and people and what and how they do things, where we can see parallels, what fascinates us and find out more about it, in what way a different structure or understanding of community is reflected in the everyday that can inspire us. part of this I guess is also to be honest about our own motives and why we were interested in taking part in the project - in some ways quite similar to working at/with lawson park/grizedale despite the obvious geo-political differences.
I would love to see more images and documents of Nanling, some non-verbal communication and mapping that I can respond to from this context. that would make it easier from me to get involved other than just bla-ing on abstractly from distance, which I suspect is completely irrelevant anyway and is doing my head in a little. (maybe we have to do the 'kingdom-thing' as in reporting from different places, but with real places to start establish some connections between ourselves and in line with how we normally approach things - maybe you shouldn't worry about a museum just yet - how and where would this be built anyway, and maybe a judgement on usefulness comes at a much later stage). one interesting thing to think about maybe - how do we go about thinking of archives/library/museums etc without relying on language, the local of which we don't speak.
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Bryan bought a hammer for no discernable reason. Everyone is a bit itching to get on with something practical - enough discussion of the complexities - simple working.
We have arranged to rent a house in the old Hutong style bit of the village, somewhere we can work, exhibit projects in progress, cook and generally enjoy the village a bit more.
Everyone has formulated approaches:
Bryan is building something, possibly a giant bread oven, a conceptual project in that he wants to buy the materials from B&Q and make pizza.
Maria is developing ideas about a folk museum and taking glossy photos of the house restaurant for a possible real eco holiday brochure
Harrold is working on a schools project working with the kids on a small performance
Laura is looking at marketing, making a stall - re presentation of the village products
Jay is developing narratives with locals and thinking about the longer term exchange possibilities as well as a packaging project
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On my way over I bought The Guardian to while away the hours and what do you know but villages are the new beach.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2008/may/03/mexico.community.tourism
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Dear All
I've arrived in Guangzhou and sat in the marvellous Movie Star Hotel round the corner from Vitmamin. It has a giant Oscar statue behind the desk, which I think should go the best Nanling YouTube entgry.
I played the bus card which got me here too early so I had to hang around at the bus stop whilst I waited for Vincent, talking to a hotel rep guy about eco tourism and the history of the entente cordiale.
Now I'm in the hotel room I'm doing the obligatory tv surf and it's very hard to escape from the endless shots of Chinese countryside on every other channel and people working in pastoral bliss (and the odd game show and pop video), so the likes of Nanling are clearly deep in the roots of a lot of people in China, far more than the english fantasy of bucolic village greens, there is an attachment or longing for the countryside which underlines all of the country's breakneck modernisation.
Tomorrow I'm meeting Mr Chen at 1000 am at Vitamin so I'll relay all the stuff you've brought up.
Do think about the triennial and what we could do as part of that in the Autumn. There is particulary acute relationship between what seems to be going on in the village and the theme of the triennial which is Beyond the Post-colonial. If somewhere was ever this is would be Nanling.
Well see you tomorrow I guess and looking forward to seeing you all.
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Its raining again. I went to get paper and pencils for the teaching class, but ended up having delicious fish and spinach with the restaurant owner Uncle Joe (not his real name) in the square, he also plied me with a kind of whiskey rice wine which was delicious. Joe has an amazing energy, a natural entrepreneur, small dynamic and super charismatic - he creates a magnetic atmosphere around his stall like a low-fi celebrity chef.
I cant help feeling a tourist park in 21st century China needs even more than the one boutique hotel and the scenery, I therefor intend to come up with the most outrageous large scale ideas my small brain can generate and try to get the developers to buy into them. I'm all for helping the villagers on an every day level but China will 'be' the next century and this place could do with a little more flamboyant optimism and destination archi-art, I mean even towns in sleepy Austria have more seductive buildings at the moment and that hasn't been a super-power since the Hapsburgs. Perhaps being weaned on a diet of the extrovert Leeds economic boom has affected my neurons in this direction, and proposing such an idea will generate an interesting conversation anyhow. Probably I will have to downsize to a plan B, and make my utopian/distopian idea as something smaller but useful - maybe an architectural model/communal bread oven for the market square? a kind of folly producing that much needed commodity - pizza. If so I think I'll get all the materials from one of the 53 B&Q DIY warehouses in China: http://www.bnq.com.cn/.
Pic: Zaha Hadid Ski Jump Insbrook, Austria
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