The Contemporary China Mobility Memory and Perspective project (CCMMP)

Collaboration with Collaboration with Jérémie Descamps, Zhang Chun, Zhou Le, Wang Gongxin, Marie Terrieux and Frédéric Henriques.
Date: 2015

The Contemporary China Mobility Memory and Perspective project is a trans-disciplinary research on the representations and imagery on mobility in China. Over the course of fifteen months, several town-planners, geographers, sociologists, artists, collectors, cultural producers amongst other specialists respectively based in France and China engaged in collaborative enquiry.
The way people migrate from place to place plays a significant role in society. Daily mobility, leisure, tourism, and migrations shape the mode of existence of people and model social networks. How these practices catalysed the memories, dreams, and hopes of the Chinese population? How the burgeoning of new means of transportation alters lifestyles and travel practices? What is the link between mobility and representations of modernity in China?
In this project, Thomas Sauvin’s duty was to build the whole corpus of images. He gathered in total 82 historical and contemporary photographs, which originated from his Beijing Silvermine archive. It was composed of propaganda photo-books, vintage studio photographs, recycled negatives, and contemporary snapshots. This corpus characterised the evolution of people’s mobility in China. It served as a tool for sociologists who conducted investigations in several Chinese cities to understand the way Chinese society remembered, forgot, imagined, represented, dreamt or lived such mobility and how it conceived its urban future.

“当代中国的流动性、记忆与视野”项目是一项关于中国流动性的表述和意象的跨学科研究。数名来自法国和中国的城市规划师、地理学家、社会学家、艺术家、收藏家、文化生产者以及其他领域的专家们在15个月内合作调研。
人们从一个地方到另一个地方的迁徙方式在社会中扮演着重要角色。日常的流动、休闲、旅游和迁徙塑造了人们的生存模式和社会网络模式。这些实践如何催化了中国民众的记忆、梦想和希望？新式交通工具的兴起如何改变生活方式和旅行实践？流动性与中国现代性的表现之间有什么联系？
在这个项目中，苏文的职责是建立整个影像语料库。他总共汇集了82张历史和当代照片，这些照片来自于他的北京银矿——一个由宣传画册、复古影楼照片、回收的底片和当代快照组成的档案库。这批照片体现了中国人流动的演化特点。对散布在中国多个城市进行调查研究的社会学家来说，这些照片帮助了他们了解中国社会如何记忆、遗忘、想象、表现、梦想或生活在这样的流动性中，以及如何构想城市的未来。