Biography
MARCELLA CAMPA and STEFANO AVESANI graduated at Venice Institute of Architecture. They have been interested in the urban growth of Chinese cities and their transformation since 2003. In 2005 they won the international Archiprix prize in Glasgow for a double coordinated project for historical districts in downtown Beijing and Shanghai. They moved to China in October 2005 and started working on the Instant Hutong project. Since 2007 their work took part in several exhibitions in China and abroad. Marcella Campa has been chosen to receive the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant for year 2010. Marcella and Stefano currently live and work in Beijing
Instant Hutong art project investigates the borderline case of Hutong districts in old downtown 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.
Their last project, 120KM, shifts the focus to the Chinese countryside and the development set in motion since the last Five-Year Plan, that is changing radically secular traditions. The various parts of the project compose an activity of social mediation, involving people’s perception of changes, participatory consultation and awareness of their role in the evolution of their habitat.
