Overlapping Heterotopias

First Hechuan Fishing Town International
New Media Arts Festival
An Old Factory: A Dying Heterotopia
Former Chongqing Cotton Mill IV,
Hechuan District, Chongqing
04.11.17 – 04.12.17

Translated by Bridget Noetzel

This is our factory, no one understands it better than us.
– Retired worker, Chongqing Cotton Mill IV

If I hadn’t gone to the first edition of this new international new media arts festival, I would not have had such a strong reaction to the visitors to the exhibitions. People from different cultural backgrounds, despite occupying the same space, could be divided into disparate social realms. Whether we divided them by their ways of thinking or speaking, they were decidedly different. At the opening, there were art people talking about avant-garde art history on stage and people off stage calling to their children to come over and watch the excitement; there were art students absorbed in the photographic works and old workers looking for people they knew in the pictures documenting the factory’s history. Together, they constituted a lively, yet discordant, sight. These seemingly incompatible scenes represented the layering of two different cultural heterotopias.

An Old Factory: A Dying Heterotopia

Chongqing Cotton Mill IV is located in Dongjintuo, Hechuan District, Chongqing. It was once a key element in the Chongqing Textile Industry Department, and the oldest and largest factory in the Dongjintuo area. After the amalgamation of state and private ownership in 1956, Chongqing Cotton Mill IV, like other large state-owned enterprises in China, established a works unit community¹ – a form that blended work and life, which was typical of neighbourhood factories, embracing social relationships and a monopolisation of social resources. The factory areas from this period were ‘utopias’ in the national ideology; they met the demands of industrialisation in New China’s early period of urban development, and they also represented the ideal state of socialist economy and culture.

With the reform of the state-owned enterprise system in 1998, workers became part of the market, instead of the leading class who loved their country and protected their works unit, so the communities making up these works units gradually dissolved. The abandoned factories became ghost towns, forsaken by the developing trends of the market economy. They became heterotopias of urban culture. The rather radical slogans in these factories and the ubiquitous portraits of leaders remind us of the past, and the decline of a vanished era. The people who once lived and worked here and their families are living relics of a bygone age, still able to remember the past and recount their memories. They had loved the collective activities, supported the factory system of management, and even retained their fervour for revolution. These old factory areas, impregnated with a lingering atmosphere of the planned economy, reveal the spiritual mainstays of the works unit communities: the working-class leaders and the collectivist spirit. They reflect the ideals of the early social and economic system of the New China, and a history of its vagaries and changes; their existence highlighted the immense upheavals that have taken place in the course of China’s modernisation.

Factories were made obsolete by the process of continual reform and changes to the environment, and changes took place in the thinking and lifestyles of their original inhabitants. The heterotopias of factory culture were dying out, and memories hardened into a static, two-dimensional view of the past. Precisely because of their demise, cultural groups from other spaces now attempt to use their own methods to intervene in these heterotopias of factory culture, by occupying, or ‘reviving’, them.

A New Media Exhibition

Collections in heterotopic museums and libraries are heterotopias that accumulate the relics of different periods and a variety of different objects and themes; here, the continuity of time has been abolished, and replaced with things organised into categories. The motivating force behind museums was the need to establish the primacy of modern Western culture in the nineteenth century. A month-long new media art exhibition is akin to a brief museum-like heterotopia; the different durational and spatial components of a variety of works have been brought together in thematic groupings on the same site, for presentational and didactic effect. Although the exhibition is being held in an old factory, it has been mounted entirely in keeping with the principles of the ‘white cube’: the majority of the works have been separated from their original environment, and displayed in a predetermined setting; some attempt has been made to exhibit works in an open-ended way, but the outcome has been unavoidably influenced by their immediate context and the sequence in which they have been installed.

Of course, this exhibition does not attempt to replicate the standards of display one might expect of an ordinary museum of modern art, and does not seek to set any kind of paradigm, although a sequence of contemporary artworks serves to trigger reflections on society today and throw the marginalisation of culture into sharp relief. The fact of holding this exhibition in Chongqing’s old Cotton Mill IV meant that the organisers were able to transfer the traditional organisational model, with the participation of all the usual factions – the curators, artists, critics, artworks, art media and students – into a different context. The various elements are integrated with one another and come together to constitute a novel artistic assembly. The factory acquires a new cultural identity, imbued with an artistic ambience that generates a heterotopia that references reality. Critical groups built on modernist cultural mechanisms criticise modern society and find it difficult to escape the strictures of modernist ideas, being estranged from, yet also embodying, the modernist spirit.

Open Site: Closed Space

‘There are others [heterotopias], on the contrary, that seem to be pure and simple openings, but that generally hide curious exclusions. Everyone can enter into these heterotopic sites, but in fact that is only an illusion – we think we enter where we are, by the very fact that we enter, excluded.’² Heterotopias are not defined physical spaces: they are the combination of relatively closed cultural spaces and relationships. Every heterotopia exists in an asynchronous space, where any normal sense of continuity is suspended; heterotopias are composed of some fixed cultural elements and inflexible relationships, governed by a kind of magnetic force and sense of awareness. Precisely because of this, theses heterotopias can coexist in the same space, overlapping yet never alternating with each other.

The two different groups of people in the exhibition appeared to be having their own separate parties in the Chongqing Cotton Mill IV. The former factory workers and their families were warmly reminiscing and finding themselves and people they knew in the old pictures; the art professionals and enthusiasts stopped and reflected in front of the works and then went on to gossip about the latest exhibition news. When asked about the contemporary artworks on show, many of the workers responded: ‘I don’t get it.’ People used to contemporary art exhibitions saw those old pictures merely as documentary material for an artistic manifestation, but they reacted to them in a more emotional way. The conflict between the two notional groups reached a peak at the time of the staged public date about the exhibition. The thematic discussion on the stage was conducted in Chinese and English, while students from art schools and residents from the surrounding neighbourhoods sat off the stage. The local residents resorted to their customary behaviour, when going to an open-air screening, for example, by eating sunflower seeds and talking loudly to their companions. The students showed their displeasure by sighing audibly at the residents making a noise. Each party believed that the other was invading their space.

For different groups, Chongqing Cotton Mill IV constitutes different heterotopic spaces. On the one hand, the factory is a remnant and a symbol of the planned economic system, which has been abandoned during the course of Chinese modernisation and represents a time that can no longer be revisited. On the other, the exhibition was a protest about modern society by the avant-garde art community, examining modern society from a specific distance. The former was China’s first model of socialist modernisation, imbued with a strong political flavour and revolutionary enthusiasm; the latter was a staged experiment, stemming from elite culture and appealing to marginalised groups with an interest in what might happen after modernism. Seen from the outside, both heterotopias might be said to occupy different spaces, but because of the significant cultural differences between the two of them, and their separation from one another, the two groups will find it difficult to achieve a consensus – hence, the creation of overlapping heterotopias.

The Anxiety and Occupation of Space

Michel Foucault believed that many issues in contemporary society stemmed from anxiety about space, and for us, space had epistemological as well as political meaning. High-speed economic development has caused the further expansion of material desires and the contraction of spaces for cultural activities. Therefore, more artistic practices are developing in the countryside, the suburbs and old factories, with the aim of inducing people to participate in local culture and life. These employ a variety of different artistic identities and methods, and exploit them for their value as problematic sites for contemporary art. Both the cultural heterotopias that are characteristic of the disappearing factories and the contemporary art heterotopias that are beginning to emerge are confronted with the spatial anxiety of being hemmed in and taken over.

The countryside, the suburbs and old factories are symbols of ideologies and systems that have been forgotten during the course of modernisation. They are ‘backward’ groups in the linear logic of development, intent on discovering new possibilities for progress and transformation. The invading art groups are both ‘non-mainstream’ groups, distanced from modern society, and those engaged in the expansion of modernism. They embed modernist cultural models in marginal sites, to build new cultural ecosystems. The two are both marginal, looking for a way out; one cannot be completely weakened or subsumed by the other, so they resist one another in the same space. Contemporary art cannot be divorced from the practice of modernist consciousness and models, so it can neither achieve a decentralised state nor blend into a local culture, to realise the complexity and diversity of postmodern culture. Both sides can only immerse themselves in their own cultural heterotopias, continuing to defend themselves and resist the others.

1. In the urban society of the new China of the 1950s, the so-called ‘System of Unit’ ( ‘Danwei’ in Chinese ) was formed nationally. The ‘community unit’ not only established an ambitious historical narrative for the transcendental development of the nation, but also provided the basic social settings that enabled unit members to settle down and get on with their activities.

2. Michel Foucault, ‘Heterotopia’ ( translated by Wang Zhe ), a speech made at a seminar of architectural studies on 14 March 1967.