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THE DEEP BLUE
Andrea Chen

Ping An Finance Center, Shenzhen, China








‘The Deep Blue is a Site Writing project which incorporates a piece of site-writing and a parallel online impromptu writing performance. The site for this project is the Ping An Finance Center, located at the CBD district of Futian, Shenzhen. As a result of the speculation, circumnavigation and confrontation towards Shenzhen’s tallest skyscraper, The Deep Blue themes on the subjective affection towards the site in three consequent layers and aspects, with a different pair of subject-object respectively. The variations of the colour “deep blue” in the chapters is a metaphoric representation of both a shift of perspective and the role of the viewer/narrator, leading to an increase of emotion in its layers and complexity.

As part of an audience-oriented writing experiment, the online impromptu writing performance on my personal social media. Based on the draft of initial writing, the performance is structured in three acts which is parallel to the original writing. The overall writing has experimented with methodologies of anthropomorphic poetic storytelling, bodily spatial navigation, image generated writing and intertextual bilingual writing.’

Andrea Chen
 

 

Echoes and Intersections is a collection of site-writings produced as part of the module Critical Spatial Practice: Site-Writing across the MA Architectural History, MA Situated Practice, and MA Historic Urban Environments dgree and PhD programmes at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

The featured works take the reader through fixed spatial locations and buildings, and on temporal journeys across ambiguous lands and waters. Written simultaneously across the globe, our situated writing offers diverse perspectives and narratives on plural geographies, landscapes and cities, through pieces interwoven with multiple, intersecting threads.

Many of the works occupy edgelands, peripheries or crossing points, writing the boundaries of buildings, states or bodies. They explore homelands, homes and selves that have been deconstructed, revealed and returned to. Echoing with memories, histories and absent others, the sites written carry the voices of place and voices displaced or fragmented, which resonate through the materials of the land - mud, sand, sky and rock.

These writings can be read in any order, allowing connections to emerge differently upon each reading.

Curatorial committee: Toby Blackman, Chia-Ying Chao, Kanza Leghari, Charlotte Morgan & Rasha Saffarini. 

With thanks to Polly Gould, Jane Rendell and David Roberts.


Bloomsbury Festival 2021

In October 2021, participants from the class read from their work on Bloomsbury Radio as part of Bloomsbury Festival 2021, alongside Polly Gould, Jane Rendell, David Roberts and participants from the class of 2020.

Find the recordings on Soundcloud here.