Professor Gerda Wielander (University of Westminster)

This talk analyzes visual interventions on danwei walls—once dominating the socialist Chinese city but today mere traces of previous social and spatial forms. The talk will consider these walls as medium of expression, arguing that in the fast changing urban landscape, danwei walls—or what remains of them—have become spaces of appearance for political action in a context where public demonstrations of bodies assembling in roads and squares is disabled by repressive policies and sanctions. Not only do danwei walls provide a public space on which a group of people, through linguistic and visual expression assert that they are “still existing, taking up space and obdurately living” (Butler 2015) but the danwei walls themselves have become precarious, existing as mere fragments of what before were connected structures defining living communities. The analysis is based on visual ethnography of three case studies which will be presented during the talk.