PROJECT      EXHIBITION      FILM      PUBLICATION      EVENT


ASSEMBLY REASSEMBLED


Shigushan village, Wuhan, China
2022 / 2023

 Between 2022 and 2023, we co-curated a series of collective happenings with the villagers of Shigushan, breathing new life into the long-forgotten People’s Commune Assembly Hall. 

Once a grand stage for sweeping political visions during China’s People’s Commune era and the fervour of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s, the hall had stood in solemn disuse since the 1980s—its doors shuttered after the commune system dissolved, its stories buried beneath layers of dust and silence. While bearing witness to the prime years of the now-elderly women that we call “grannies,” it remains almost invisible to the children who were born after its decline. With time, even its presence faded from memory, becoming a forgotten monument standing along the village’s central spine. 
In the autumn of 2022, we invited a group of middle-aged women that we call “aunties” to rehearse their National Day dance inside the empty hall. As their movements filled the space and the loudspeaker pulsed with music, something unexpected happened: villagers, drawn by curiosity and sound, began to gather. Children wheeled in on bicycles, wide-eyed; elders wandered in, many for the first time since the hall’s closure. The space stirred, awakened not by slogans or speeches, but by rhythm and community.

Then, on a hot summer day in 2023, we transformed the hall once again—this time into a screen-back theatre of the everyday. Through film installations, we unveiled the quiet poetry of village life: dances, gestures, glances—intimate fragments now projected where once only ideology had been proclaimed. The dance rehearsal returned onscreen, but this time as shared memory, not mere event. The hall, once a vessel of politics, became a mirror of the community’s soul.
The entire village came. They watched. They laughed. They remembered. And they stayed. Among all the acknowledgements we have received, their presence and joy remain the most profound.

These moments now live on in The Hall, an experimental documentary woven from fragments of return, revival, and reimagining.


LINKS

RELATED PROJECT
    Ripple Ripple Rippling


RELATED FILM
    The Hall

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Our deepest gratitude goes to the villagers of Shigushan, who have opened their lives to us with generosity and trust.
Fieldwork in the village was supported by the Graham Foundation’s Research Grant (2022–23).


CREDITS
Images by Chen Zhan and Mengfan Wang


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