Syndicated from Design China
In an exclusive, long-length feature, we interview Beatrice Leanza, the new Creative Director of Beijing Design Week (BJDW), about the 2013 edition of the internationally-recognised city-wide event.
Where are you originally from, and what brought you to Beijing?
I moved to Beijing from Milan in 2002, fresh with a degree in Asian Studies from Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. My dissertation thesis focused on contemporary Chinese art, whose liminality in academic discourse back then equalled only to its critical and spatial relegation on the domestic front. Clearly, that was bound to change soon.
With the current institutional and social constituencies of art nowhere to be found, my early adventures in China started in the urban village of Caochangdi at China Art Archives and Warehouse (CAAW) – the historical alternative space founded in the late 1990s by Ai Weiwei, Frank Uytterhagen and Hans Van Dyck. Built across the local police station by Weiwei himself, CAAW was home to the frugal, monolingual community of artists that gravitated in the residential peripheries of the capital. It was an outpost for self-expression, and one of the only windows for the growing number of travelling consultants and curators to peak through.
CAAW was run by three people, including me. As a factotum, I kept up with feeding the archive started by Hans (which is currently being digitalised by the AAA in Hong Kong), mounted exhibitions, wrote press releases and articles, entertained international visitors, and advised institutions and early collectors. I was confused and intoxicated by the gregarious vitality of a collectivity filled with a love for art and individuality (and, yes, also by the rather less metaphorical spirit of erguotou-fueled arty dinners late at night).
How has the BJDW 2013 Creative Director role been so far?
To be honest, it feels quite natural. A next chapter in my personal book around the joys and discontent of curatorial practice!
During the past 6 years, prior to my appointment, I worked as an independent critic and curator both in and out of Beijing. I have initiated and contributed to a variety of projects that have often addressed the shape-shifting forces informing the intellectual and cultural landscape of China’s “global decade” (i.e. post-2001) which, by the mid-2000s, was moulded by stringent market-driven interests and a complacent loosening of governmental directives favouring a “creative China made for export”. The situation, of course, allowed necessary systemic structures for the production and dissemination of art and culture to be put into place, but also challenged the degree of autonomy with which criticality was to truly address the complexities of the country’s rapid transformation, uniquely imbricated with the demise of both geographical and disciplinary boundaries on a global scale.
The research practice BAO Atelier – a China-based think tank fostering research and practice across art, design and architecture, which I founded in 2006 – intended to operate as a catalyst and dispositive to engage scattered-yet-dynamic creative communities that were starting to emerge in the local context. Active in the field of architecture, design (graphics, products, video and animation, among others), music, and digital production, they had come to populate a professional world of both makers and thinkers beyond the realm of given institutional environments. I have been involved in such independent communities since their earlier years. It was the uncontested commitment of like-minded individuals that instantiated new synergies and alternative models of critical practice to accommodate both actions and reflections in disorienting times.
First and foremost, I see BJDW similarly expressive of a latent force of productive communities that are both premise and product of an altered, or wilfully transformative, self-perception – a timely and organic response to a desire for cultural re-appropriation, intellectual prowess and social cohesiveness. In short, a return to human scale. As domestic economic imperatives and official agendas seem to herald the end of the Made-in-China era, government-supported initiatives, like Beijing Design Week, forecast a new historical momentum: one of self-propelled solutions, which are less about fostering the image of a perpetual market of the future, and are now more about configuring effective synergies among creative communities, the industry, and the general public.
What changes are you making for BJDW this year that differ from last year?
Structurally, we are working with the same agenda entailing Design Hop areas, the official forum, the Guest City program (which, this year, is dedicated to Amsterdam) etc, that have been very successful already and allow us a lot of flexibility. If the previous two editions mapped Beijing internationally – showing what it is and what it can do – this year we are focusing our efforts on enforcing the “who”.
Recently, I bumped into an article that quoted what artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy once wrote about design; that it is “resourcefulness and inventiveness (…) designing is not a profession but an attitude”. So I’d like BJDW 2013 to “perform” the idea that design is neither a static noun nor a definite attribute, but rather signifies an expressive motion – a synchronised mode of thinking, sensing and imagining reality that is both anchored to the domain of human life while navigating across the interstitial realms of instinctive and productive purposelessness; between problem solving and problem making; between synthetic thinking and deconstructive agency.
Rather than adopting an overarching thematic framework as a guiding device, we are rendering a more cohesive program across the existing zones so as to work around the latent dynamics that inform the ordinary as a product of cumulative processes of historical development and creative appropriation. We are inscribing disciplinary domains that moderate design discourse and practice within specific urban zones so that each project can resonate and augment this experiential storytelling that we are building with Beijing as its theatre.
This is pivotal for BJDW – to avoid the constrains of a temporary, product-oriented or event-focused initiative and, rather, manifest itself as a process, an incubator and a catalyst for ongoing, engaged perspectives that stem from and are inspired by the local context.
The historical area of Dashilar shall play host to a whole new program of longer-term initiatives that we are building in collaboration with the local developers, taking design heritage and its multiple accounts relevant to both the built environment and intangible cultural heritage as a springboard for site-specific projects, exhibitions, and urban and architectural interventions. CCD – The Community, which I curated last year at its first edition, will continue as a hotbed for experimental, innovation-driven research in design making and thinking, looking at the intersection of art, design and new technologies. It will also bring together a host of initiatives from the local “maker” community, as well as the independent creators living, working and producing in China.
In 751, an exciting new set of site-responsive projects are also going to take place with amazing group exhibitions and larger-scale installations that address design as semantics of experience and place-making, with an accent on its connections with digital culture and interactivity.
Key exhibitions and smaller yet thriving new hubs in other parts of town will further articulate what design does and what it means for 21st century urban environments like Beijing. All in all, we are showing how Beijing as a living ecosystem partakes in forging new meanings for design as an un-claimable territory, but as a chemistry of molecular singularities.
What do you think BJDW 2012 did for China?
BJDW cannot speak in the past – at least not yet. If it is doing something though, it is trying to challenge the way we speak and communicate with and of design. It is pushing things, people and ideas out of their comfort zones. Everyone in this business envisions, and rightfully so, Beijing to perform assertively in easing the way for design into the local market, to boost the industry, the city, its infrastructure, its liveability, its capacity to hold onto a promise of an enlightened and better future. I think nowadays, you can achieve this only by making yourself proponent of new ways to make urgent issues a common task.
From factory floor to academia, with international forums open to policy makers, mayors from global and equally-congested cities struggling with similar pressures, BJDW aims at fostering and promoting forward-looking solutions originating from the design industry, acting both as an infrastructural provider and a cultural connective system, sustaining actions and reflections unhinged from a rhetoric of fast-paced production and consumption that is often, and unproductively so, associated to China.
Tell us a BJDW-related secret or inside story.
BJDW is an open secret! For the sake of those that don’t know, I am not of Chinese descent. I am fully laowai. This has been, for a short while, a bit of an “inside story” in itself. But I speak fluent Mandarin and I can drink, so…
What do you personally hope to achieve?
Taking the week and turning it into a full year! Beijing Design Week is more “Beijing” than “design week”. I urge anyone enquiring about taking part to think of it as the place where one can play out self-doubt and let go of self-referentiality. If you don’t wanna play by the rules, design them!
Images generously provided by BJDW. CAAW image via ArchDaily.
