People

Riccardo Arena

Riccardo Arena is a visual artist who studied at the Brera Academy of arts in Milan. He specializes in the media of animated videa and ceramics. His works portray disconnection from society and the struggles within a disease like Parkinson.
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Laura Belém

Statemenst by the artist: I have been working with installations, sound, photography and video. Site-specificity is often the point of departure for the creative proess. The works engage landscape, architecture or other site-specific issues, such as everyday relations or historical aspects of a place. The intention is to trigger poetic and fictional narratives through simple operations that invite the viewer to reinvent his/her relation with the surrounding environment.
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Jeb Beresford

Jeb Beresford has been leading the Alsop Design Consulting (Shanghai) office for over 2 years with a broadening portfolio of mixed-use architectural developments and master planning projects underway. With a passion for imaginative, sustainable solutions to contemporary urban issues, Jeb has worked on a diverse range projects across the world, including Hong Kong Airport, GCHQ, Bradford Masterplan, Goldsmiths College and the pioneering 'Schools for the Future' initiative in the UK. Jeb is now responsible for the design and delivery of the 250,000sqm Gao Yang Riverfront development alongside the new Shanghai International Cruise Terminal.

Alsop Design Consulting (Shanghai) is an award wining international architectural and urban design practice with talented Architects, Urban planners, graphic designer, film maker and Mixed media specialist etc. The practice is positioned to work on projects around the world from the foundation office in the UK, operating from studios in London, Shanghai, Beijing, Toronto and Singapore.
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Jean Sebastien Bourdages

Jean Sebastien Bourdages is a French Canadian architect living and working is Shanghai. He is a project designer for B+H architects.
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Ruben Dario Kleimeer

As a Dutch photographer / artist Ruben Dario Kleimeer researches the urban environment. He selects subjects on basis of remarkable use of form and the touching boundaries between man and nature. In his series on Chongming Island he registered the first connections being made between the Shanghai's current urbanization and the planned development.
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Thomas Charveriat

Thomas Charveriat creates animatronic installations with GPS, SMS, video, sound, electronic data and humor that interact with the viewer. Complexity and elegance are combined to create sensorial atmosphere associated with vulnerability and apprehension. The artist currently exhibits on a regular basis in international new media arts shows, such as Art Futura and Observatori, and has collaborated with various art institutions such as Museo de las Ciencias Principe Felipe, Museo Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and the Museo Maritimo de Barcelona.
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Damiano Fossati

Damiano Fossati is an italian architect working and living in Shanghai. He graduated in Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Milan.
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Robert Davis

Robert Davis is an artist and Primary Art teacher at Shanghai American School in Shanghai. He is also creative consultant for art programming for Li Min School, a school for children of migrant workers. He has been living and working in Shanghai for the past five years.
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Maria das Dores Berthommé

Maria das Dores Berthommé is a French visual artist currently residing in Shanghai. In her work she investigates the concept of identity, whether political, sexual or architectural, in a thorough way. She masters a great range of different media and continuously experiments with exploring new techniques to emphasize her investigations.
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Vanessa Fernández Guasch

Vanessa Fernández Guasch graduated from the academy San Alejandro in Cuba in 2005. She now studies at the Faculty of Visual Arts at the Instituto Superior de Arte in la Havana, Cuba. Artist statement: In my art the documentation, like memory, has always been linked to the individual. The fundamental in the birth of a constant gaze, participative like a research to capture, classify and archive the memories within my environment. In this way the tracks of the individual is present in the most minimal act.
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Frédéric Froument

Frédéric Froument is a photographer living in Paris and working around the world. His subjects are placed within the city environment turning the characters inside-out into the urban landscape. With these portraits he creates a link between the human and the city's soul.
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Laurence Gillet

Laurence Gillet works for various dance companies in Paris. French of Chinese origin, she has a special interest in mixing dance and martial arts. She discovered dance through performance and improvisation and continuous working on her projects introducing new media like photo/video in her creations.
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Giel Groothuis

Giel Groothuis is a Dutch architect working in both Amsterdam and Shanghai. In 2005 he has moved to China to work as architect and urban planner where he has been involved in large scale projects such as the World Expo 2010. Besides this he is founding member of FAR architectural gallery and the urban research platform Sinocities.
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Gosia Grubba

Gosia Grubba is Movie Art Director and Project Manager for art projects. She studied European studies and International Development Studies in the Netherlands. After graduating she got involved in the film industry and art projects. She is founder of the social, architecture-based project Raise It Up! which was executed with help of Judith Vorwerk.
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Allard van Hoorn

Allard van Hoorn creates a visual language made of signs, symbols and demarcations that indicate alternative routes in contemporary society. It is a visual code he co-develops with people he works with in all parts of the world and, specifically, in local communities. His complete body of work is aimed at assisting mankind in obtaining another way of looking and seeing, discovering that we now have the option to make it work for all of humanity.
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Sophie Houlou

Sophie Houlou is a French urban planner of Turkish descent. After her education she decided to travel and investigate the building boom in China. Currently residing in Shanghai, she participates in several investigative projects.
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Jiang Jun

Designer and critic, has been working on urban research and experimental study, exploring the interrelationship between design phenomenon and urban dynamic. He has been the editor-in-chief of Urban China magazine since the end of 2004, in the mean time working on the book Hi-China. Born in Hubei in 1974, got bachelor's degree in Tongji University in Shanghai and master's degree in Tsinghua University in Beijing, now teaching in Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.
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Christian Leibenger

Christian Leibenger is a Spanish architect currently living and working in Shanghai. As a result of his constant research, he completed several autonomous projects which question the role of architecture and urban planning in different societies.
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Hou Liang

Hou Liang, after gaining his Master of architecture from KU Leuven, Belgium, worked as a project designer for several Belgian Architectural Offices. He now lives and works in Shanghai.
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Mati Mani

Mati Mani is from Spain but resides in Shanghai being is part of the educational and curatorial department of the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai.
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Yan Mengfei

Yan Mengfei is an architect at Department of Art & Design, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University.
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Andrea Neidhoefer

Andrea Neidhoefer is currently Head of Education Department as well as Assistant Curator at MoCA, has a Master degree in Art History from the University of Vienna.
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Viktor Oldiges

Viktor Oldiges is a German architect working in Shanghai. He has been conducting research on Chinese urban planning and architecture since 2002. He is one of the founding members of FAR China and the urban research platform Sinocities.
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Guillaume Ségur

Guillaume Ségur is a French visual artist. His installations are the result of philosophical interpretations of aspects of the everyday life. Guillaume gained a grant to undertake a project on Kung Fu and urbanism in Shanghai and is accepted at the prestigious ateliers de Paris for the upcoming year.
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Stefano Tedesco

Stefano Tedesco, born in 1966, is a London-based musician. He has a degree in percussion instruments at the Conservatory of Music 'L. Marenzio' of Brescia, Italy. He has collaborated with many Italian symphonic orchestras and opera theatres. He also has collaborated with the contemporary music group 'Arcana ensemble' of Brescia. He moved to London in 2004 to develop his interest in the free improvisation and the experimental music. He is now working on various projects using vibraphone, percussion, sound objects, live electronics and feedback. Other projects involve video and dance.
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Mimi Tong

Mimi Tong is a visual artist and in her own words 'an encloseted architect'. In her work, she investigates urban space as a concept and as a subject. Her way of manipulating different materials into new structures, which resemble, imitate or assimilate urbanity, testifies of a fresh aesthetic view. Mimi received a grant from the Freedman Foundation to undertake a residency at Red Gate, Beijing. She currently works and lives in Sydney.
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Ruslán Torres

Ruslán Torres studied at Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba where he lives and works. He participated in numerous exhibitions like the Biennial of Contemporary Art in Havana and is the initiator of L.CONDUCT-A-RT, a laboratory for social conduct and its revelations through contemporary art.
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Alexandra Verhaest

Alexandra Verhaest received a Batchelor's degree in Photography at the Sintlukas School of Arts, Brussels. At the moment, she is fulfilling her Masters with a project, she partly realized in China. In the past years of her education, she has been focusing on documentary photography. Using internet blogs, urban legends as well as duff history books as a source of inspiration, her style has evolved in what she describes herself as 'narrative photographic investigations'. The dyptich 'Madonna/Medea', an investigation of the iconic motherfigure, is to be published in the book 'Theory of Photography' by Henri Van Lier. While completing a residency at Island6 Arts Centre she participated in various exhibitions at Island6 and ifa gallery, Shanghai.
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Judith Vorwerk

Judith Vorwerk works as a freelance art educator. After her graduation at the Willem de Kooning Art Academy with a major in art education she worked on several interesting children and youth art projects. She is co-producer of Raise It Up! Shanghai together with Gosia Grubba and also initiated different educative projects with art working with Children in Rotterdam, Ghana and China.
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Qi Shaoli

Qi Shaoli is an architect at Department of Art & Design, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University.
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Boris Svartzman

Boris Svartzman, Franco-argentinian works as an independent photographer. He's been living seven years in China where he practiced chinese martial arts (wushu and taiji), which made him investigate contemporary dance when he went back to France. He's now doing different collaborations with choregraphers and has a special interest in doing interactive art between photography, dance and video. Meanwhile he maintains doing social photography, amongst others publishing in international reviews.
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He Xin

He Xin is an architect at Department of Art & Design, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University.
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Ying Yueting

Ying Yueting is an architect at Department of Art & Design, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University.
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Projects

Workshop education and re-addressing cultural roots Ruben Dario Kleimeer, Jeb Beresford, Gosia Grubba & Judith Vorwerk, Andrea Neidhoefer, Mati Mani, Alexandra Verhaest, Sophie Houlou, Robert Davis and Qi Shaoli, Yan Mengfei, He Xin and Ying Yueting of Tongji University

This exercise consists of building a city based on primary-school-constructed buildings that will be implemented in a utopian urban setting.

This is a continued version of an earlier project Raise it up! By Gosia Gruba & Judith Vorwerk in which Dutch refugee children created a hybrid urban landscape based on the children's cultural roots and their new living environment. The project also combines the architectural proposal for Chongming island, just in front of Shanghai, by Alsop architects / Jeb Beresford and a documentary photography project by Ruben Dario. The two workshops with different groups of children were executed at MoCA Shanghai.





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Urban Dance - Foreground / Background Boris Svartzman, Laurence Gillet and Allard van Hoorn

A man dancing alone on a square in Shanghai forms the basis for this sequence of choreographies that takes the viewer through the urban landscapes of the Paris of the East and West and back where foreground becomes background and onwards.



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Tricycle House Christian Leibenger

Is constructing a traditional Chinese house on a tricycle to be destructed in a performance drive through the fields around Island6 symbolizing the transformation of Shanghai's urban landscape.



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Folding Cities Mimi Tong

Between February 26th and 28th Mimi showed insight in her working process and results based on cut and folded urban imagery. Her imagery is based on a investigation of the urban space which is two-dimensional. She uses special paper to print these images and then starts working on them by cutting and folding recreating the three-dimensional. The pieces are then arranged in different settings. At Island6 a large scale presentation was chosen.



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re-Designing the Guggenheim Allard van Hoorn, Stefano Tedesco, Yan Mengfei and Qi Shaoli

This project researches the effects of a transformation process. The object, in this case the physical Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is transformed from sketch into a building, a dance, a drawing, music and then back into a building. This re-designing sequence is aimed at studying the result of re-thinking the metaphysical appearance of an object.

The project takes the initial sketch of the Guggenheim building as a point of departure. This sketch was made by Frank Gehry when he was commissioned the project. The drawing was then memorized by Allard van Hoorn who danced in the dark using a torch to re-draw the original sketch. The building is now re-created into movement, into a dance.

The light-drawing was subsequently sent from Shanghai to London where sound artist Stefano Tedesco composed three individual sound pieces based on the drawing.

The sound pieces where sent on to Shanghai as input for Qi Shaoli and Yan Mengfei, architects of the Tonji University in Shanghai, to create architectural models based on this newly created music. They did not know the original input was the Guggenheim building in Bilbao so they had only the music as inspiration. With this last step we translate the processed material back into a (scale model for a) physical building.







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Low Polygon Boulder (Landscape Machine) Guillaume Ségur

A mathematically designed boulder that was inspired by a Chinese rock for printmaking. The piece reflects on the relationship between nature and human intervention.



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Chinese Whisper Frédéric Froument, Mimi Tong, Alexandra Verhaest, Allard van Hoorn, Ruben Dario Kleimeer, Jeb Beresford, Jean Sebastien Bourdages, Damiano Fossati, Giel Groothuis, Viktor Oldiges and Hou Liang

Chinese Whisper is an online collective photo-blog project running until April 1st. This project manipulates and re-publishes an original urban image by Frédéric Froument. This image evolves over time adding layer upon layer as it is twisted, cut, pasted, folded and burnt as the image is 'whispered' on to the next participant.

The project was executed via a blogsite enabling all participants to download, edit and upload their submissions. For complete overview of this project please visit:
http://chinesewhisperforpui.blogspot.com/



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Household objects Jiang Jun and Urban China

Show an interesting collection of objects taken from the urban landscape ranging from a handmade gun to a basketball-water-bucket.



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Escuchos Vanessa Fernández Guasch with help of Alexandra Verhaest

This is a project of Cuban artist Vanessa Fernández Guash who recorded sound fragments of conversations of people passing by on certain locations in Havana, Cuba. Alexandra Verhaest executed the Shanghainese version of this project. The works are exhibited side by side to be able to compare the Cuban and Chinese outcome.





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Movimiento de Traslación Vanessa Fernández Guasch with help of Alexandra Verhaest

This is a project of Cuban artist Vanessa Fernández Guash who did a cartographic recording with white pencil on black paper of the streets of her hometown of Havana, Cuba. Alexandra Verhaest executed the Shanghainese version of this project. The works are exhibited side by side to be able to compare the Cuban and Chinese outcome.





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Comportamientos Ruslán Torres with help of Alexandra Verhaest

This is a project of Cuban artist Ruslán Torres. With his initiative L.CONDUCT-A-RT he executed a long term research into social behavior in the public space. In this case the work Compartamientos exists of abstracted situations of small groups of people who are presented to the audience who are to complete the work by giving their idea of the reason of the specific situation depicted. Alexandra Verhaest executed the Shanghainese version of this project. The works are exhibited side by side to be able to compare the Cuban and Chinese outcome.





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2103 (Panoptic Blueprint) Alexandra Verhaest

2103 (Panoptic Blueprint) is a research into social structures based on architectural analysis that started early in this Platform for Urban Investigation with observing the panoptic as an architectural form but also as a model for societal hierarchy looking at the structures of control; the periphery towards the centre and vice versa.



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Bunker Maria das Dores Berthommé

Investigates the realization of a 5 meter high bunker made out of Styrofoam. The work invites the audience to experience the urban landscape of Shanghai in a completely altered way.



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Video Program Riccardo Arena, Laura Belém and Boris Svartzman

This is the video program specially selected for the Platform for Urban Investigation Shanghai II. The different videos shown are all related to the urban environment and add to the general research being explored in the other sculptural, photographic, performance and workshop based pieces documented as a result of this Platform. The program was shown continuously at the video room of Island6 Arts Center during the Platform for Urban Investigation.



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