instant hutong - urban carpet

images from Urban Carpet, a project by Instant Hutong. the carpets are hand-embroidered in a technique that was used to create propaganda posters by the Communist Party in the 1970s. the carpets depict maps of the Hutong area and were integrated into Carpet surprise happenings, when fragments of the project were shown to the Hutong dwellers themselves.

Urban Carpet is one of several different projects centered around the geographic area of Hutong in Beijing:

"The work explores both spatial and social aspects to screen the uniqueness of a urban tissue made of lanes and courtyard houses and the community of people living in it. It is organized as a series of art pieces and installations on the border between art, social investigation and urban research in the aim to generate and stimulate an open debate. The work is currently involving questions such density, unstructured reappropriation, gentrification, relationship between people and their physical space, property speculation, disappearing community and identity.

The approach is open and flexible, mixing together different media and techniques of visual arts to capture every little mark of this reality in transformation. We started using maps of old Beijing, which have been reinterpreted as spatial textures, transformed, decontextualized, reinvented and readapted. Those detailed maps are generally forbidden from Chinese government and at first it was necessary a preliminary research work to get them and then redraw completely line by line.

The purpose is now to go further with the Instant Hutong project and then bring it back in form of fragments to the city districts it was inspired from. We are going to organize some kind of public temporary events in which the work will be shown to the Hutong dwellers. Those happenings will take place either inside the courtyards or on the public lane in a sort of exhibition way that is sympathetic to the urban and social anarchic structure of the Hutong itself."

See more of the project here