DRC NO.12: A ‘Migratory’ Space of Site-specificity and (Dis)identification

Abstract

This paper looks into a selection of multi-media, site-specific art projects presented in DRC No. 12, a non-profit, experimental art space in Beijing. The space is a residential apartment located within the Diplomatic Residence Compound (DRC). DRC was constructed in 1971 as one of the first office and residence compounds for foreign staff of embassies, international organizations and news agencies. It was a cradle of cultural and artistic exchange between China and the world. In today, it still constitutes an important, alternative domain to observe, perceive and listen to the world, partially freed from governmental controls and surveillance. Opened in 2017, DRC No. 12 has held a dozen of exhibitions, which investigate issues of social development, transnational, transregional engagement and exchange in close association with the history as well as spatial and sociocultural specificities of the site. All works have to be set up within this two-room apartment and exhibitions can be only accessed by appointment. This paper draws on Rosi Braidotti’s conception of ‘nomadic subjectivity’, which refers to ‘not fluidity without borders, but rather an acute awareness of nonfixity of boundaries’. Braidotti’s discussion relates the notion of ‘migration’ to not simply literal, physical movements, but to a subjectivity of transgression, which resists settling into existing social orders and habitual ways of thinking and behavior. This paper examines how the works shown at DRC NO. 12 delineate a ‘migratory’ aesthetic site of social engagement in-between private and public, past and present and local and global, traversing clearly demarcated boundaries; and how these works define an immediate, site-specific experience based on viewers’ embodied and sensory engagement, which not only engenders a discursive field of knowledge production and intellectual debate across time and space, but proposes a mode of subject formation through both identification and disidentification with dominant sociopolitical structures.