Xiaoyi Nie

How does collective marching perform as a curatorial method? This practice-based research started from examining a curatorial project Long March: A Walking Visual Display (2002) in which about 150 artists and intellectuals retraced the historic route of Chinese Red Army’s 6000 mile retreat across China (1934-1936) with carrying out themed seminars and exhibitions. Instead of looking at the project from the perspective of participatory art (Bishop, 2012) or site-specific art(Miwon Kwon, 2002), this research analyses the omnipresence of the curatorial in Long March: A Walking Visual Display as its introduction to bring out the inquiries on how planning is carried out in process-based projects, how situational knowledge and bodily expeirence translate into each and how performativity and documentation shape a curatorial project. Besides, the heritage of walking in contemporary art is also examined from a perspective of marching. 

By investigating the Long March Project archive, interviewing previous participants and contemporary practitioners, this research aims to depict how the on-site dynamism of collective changed over the trip through the long distance, duration, rhythm and intensity of marching. This research will update the discussion of collective marching apart from its appearance in artworks and social events and imagine how collective marching can be applied by the curatorial, a comprehensive medium as collective as marching and always responding to urgency. 

Key words: collective marching, collectivity, the curatorial, programming, Long March

What does it mean to inhabit the temporary? Where do we find the local, when we are constantly on-the-move? Who forms our community, when we exist inside a global network? And what does it mean to be an artist in today’s digitalised and nomadic world?

As precarity escalates in the global city, ways of living, modes of working, and networks of people have become hyper-mobile. Taking place at Gasworks, with its international artist-residency programme set in Vauxhall, a rapidly developing area of London, Itinerant Assembly takes this context as its starting point.

Over the course of four months, this curated project will unfold outwards in a series of assemblies: momentarily bringing together diverse practitioners and publics in real and virtual space to reflect on our contemporary nomadic condition and to question the productive potential of the temporary.

Distilled here in a series of graphic manuals, every Assembly is open to reactivation, and contributes to a cumulative body of research which will be interrogated during the final Assembly in May 2017.

Curated by Alice White, Chloe Hodge, Hannah Zafiropoulos, Xiaoyi Nie, Rosie Hermon and Tiffany Leung as part of the Curating Contemporary Art programme Graduate Projects 2017, Royal College of Art

Website: http://www.itinerantassembly.gasworks.org.uk/