The research Of Haunted Spaces investigates the contemporary Chinese defunct urban spaces shaped by the global capitalism and expresses them through the experimental poetics in a film. The phenomenon of Chinese ghost cities, which were built for millions but lived-in by no one, points to an unsearched area regarding the distribution and circulation of global cultural and social capitals. One of the main questions will not only be where these places are and how and why they come into existence but in a broader sense how capitalism is effecting and thus haunting the living conditions of our contemporary times. These new cities are an effect of hyper-modernity, always coming to a head to something excessive. They are heterotopias because urban spaces are turned into void, exhausted and empty ruins, when once the collective fantasy had the grandiose vision of boosting prosperity but are now anachronistic non-sites where histories are forgotten. The complexity woven among the investigation can best be realized through art-based research to find the intertextual significance in exploring the enigmas of how we live today with the cultural and economic flow from one place to the other.
‘Of Haunted Spaces’ is supported by FWF (Austrian Science Fund), Elise Richter PEEK, 2016-2019
Project Number: V492-G24