Back from Beijing

I spent Christmas and New Year in Beijing, China.

The city is changing so fast, the Chinese are building at a tremendous rate.  Staying in the Central Business District we were surrounded by shiny new skyscrapers and neon lights.  Incredibly clean streets but quite polluted by the thousands of cars, which are really starting to cause a problem with the traffic and emissions snarling up the city.

 
There are still masses of bicycles everywhere, though, sneaking their way down the sides of the car-packed streets, in this city that was once famous for its millions of bikes.  (Carole and I both love bikes!)

 Being in Beijing is a bit like Time Travel.  I get this feeling in many cities, one of the reasons that I love them, but in Beijing it is extreme.  China is an ancient civilisation and its history is millenia long, at the same time it is embracing the new at an astonishing rate.

Exploring the city you really feel this, the ancient and the new are built next to each other everywhere.

You can lose yourself in the huge complexes and tranquillity of the Forbidden City or the Summer Palace, and yet step out of the gate and you are instantly transported back into the futuristic reconstruction of the city.

When I was working on the Children's Trail in St George's, Leicester, in 2007, I wrote about cities:

There is a dreamlike quality in many cities, where buildings and street designs are worked out as they go along and have to fit in and around older structures.  In Beijing I fear that they are in danger of knocking down and replacing too much, thus losing the richness of the layers of architectural history that gives most cities their unique characters.  The Chinese are only just starting to realise the importance of their heritage and that it must be rescued.

Beijing is full of contradictions.  Despite Communism and the Cultural Revolution, ancient belief systems still persist.  The Chinese are famous for their superstitions.  Even the new buildings are still built on Feng Shui principles!  The famous "Birds Nest" Olympic Stadium represents to the Chinese the body of the dragon, therefore they had to balance this with another building which stands a little way away, respresenting the dragon's tail.

The body of the dragon...

...and the tail

(Apparently the head of the dragon is underground!)

Another wonderful thing we found was the Shard Shop.  Tucked away and quite hard to track down, this little family run business is using old culture in innovative ways.  During the Cultural Revolution people were not allowed to keep their traditional Ming and Qing pottery and so thousands of these important pieces were smashed up.  The Shard Shop is gathering these shards of pottery and making them into new things.  We bought several shard boxes as gifts, lacquered boxes with beautifully decorated blue and white pottery shards inlaid into their lids, curved pieces that hinted at their original life as a huge rounded vase.  Wonderful and unique.

 And how about this for mapping!  The Temple of Heaven, a circular building built to represent the celestial year, with four inner pillars for the seasons, twelve outer pillars for the months,  you look up into the ceiling of the Temple and it is like a plan for the heavens!

Turning towards tomorrow

In 2008, when Carole and I were working on the Fingerprints project, we wrote quite a lot of poetry.  Going through some of our musings the other day, I came across this that I wrote:

It seems that, in our collaboration, we had already started considering the links between time and travel.

Click here to see some of our other Musings from the project. 

We are definitely turning towards tomorrow now, and really just starting out on our project.  We have already had responses to our postcard, so thanks to those who have replied.  Responses have been enthusiastic and encouraging and there have been suggestions of other people we should contact, thus already expanding our Undiscovered Network!

Time & Motion

Not so much a ride but two different walks.

Walk 1, August 2010

Sherringham to Weybourne and back

5 miles, 2 hrs 30 mins

Stain glasses - the romance of old windows,

even when spending a penny.

The invitation of waves

3 lines 1 curvaceous dip

Come no closer, this is private

a memory of past sea defences

Sherringham Park -

a list of do's and don't's

Keep out or come hither?

Bathing under blue.

Some space to think.

Two steep hills, one stop.

Several meet & greetings.

Baggage stacked for another day,

fresh from the past,

that other country.

Waiting for appropriate signals,

a green light, forward motion.

An invitation to sit, to plan a trip,

watch others depart.

Gathering cloud, rain puddling,

the English holiday experience.

The weight of time.

Time & Motion.

when travel stops...

I am stuck in France.

Stranded without a means of travel for three days, due to the National Strike in France.

I am staying in a small village in a rural part of Les Landes. I had to return my rented car on Monday. There is no bus service here, no train. (I do have access to a bicycle!)

When you get stuck, you start to realise how much travel in general is a part of our lives now. I am very much caught in limbo now - it's not really a holiday anymore because I'm not supposed to be here, and I am acutely aware of how much work I should be doing right now but can't! At the same time it's not a normal rest day or work day either, because I have so little contact with anybody anywhere, I can't go anywhere and there is very little I can progress workwise, not having any equipment or literature with me. So what to do?

So back to the blog... at least here I can record some of my rambling thoughts! "Stuckness" brings me back to some of the conversations Carole and I had in the Fingerprints project - thinking about areas of deprivation where people feel stuck in various ways. A part of our project became about how the mind was where you could always find freedom of a sort - you can travel in your imagination and become anything you want, be anywhere you want... We found the church in the Beanfield Estate to be a place where "mind travel" could happen, the church space, with its vastness, colour and light, gave you the feeling that you could launch yourself up into the vaulted space and take off to somewhere in your mind... time became flexible and inconsequential in that space... time also feels very strange and stretched for me right here now!

Travel and time are two linked entities... a very little research into "time" as a fourth dimension immediately rises the notion of time as something that bends according to travel and speed. The faster you travel, the slower time becomes.

I remember the relativity experiment with two aeroplanes - both planes started from the same place on earth with clocks synchronised to the same time. They then both flew in opposite directions along the equator around the earth at the same speed. The clocks on the planes were then compared with each other and with the clock on the earth at their starting point. One clock showed time had moved on significantly slower than the clock on earth, the other clock faster. (Look up the Hafele–Keating experiment 1971)

Things like that make a great impression on me - we are so used to the idea that time is a reliable measurement that does not falter, then scientists manage to do an experiment that proves otherwise... it blows out the window everything we think we are sure of. I think we all at some point have had the sensation that time is bending, faster or slower... perhaps it actually is!

In 2006, when I was working as part of CoLab, we did a project called the "Time Exchange" where we set up a market stall in Nottingham for the buying and selling of time. It posed the question: if you could buy more time, how much would you have and what would you do with it?

CoLab website