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M+, Hong Kong. Gift of Urbanus, 2013, © Urbanus
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East Galleries, 218
URBANUS 都市實踐
Villages Amidst the City, Video for Urban Village Studies (2004–2005), Shenzhen, China 中國深圳「城中村研究」（2004–2005）
2005
Richie Gelles completed Villages Amidst the City, Video for Urban Village Studies (2004–2005), Shenzhen, China while he was working as a designer and filmmaker for Urbanus, an architecture and design studio and think-tank in Shenzhen. In the work’s introduction, the camera zooms in on city dwellers going about their daily activities—working, shopping, painting, smoking, eating—then pans out to show groups of people in an urban neighbourhood. These scenes demonstrate the interconnectedness of people, especially how their symbiosis is facilitated by their architectural environs. The remainder of the film comprises two sections: ‘City’ and ‘Villages’. The former denotes Shenzhen, the site where the work was filmed. Here, Gelles focuses on buildings, thoroughfares, and commerce—essentially, the infrastructure of the city that enables peoples’ movements. Meanwhile, ‘Villages’ foregrounds people, flipping the aforementioned logic to imply that it is the structures of the city that are made possible by people.
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