. . . . . Blue.TMP . . . . .
BaO was invited, alongside 7 other practices, by the Songzhuang art festival to create a temporary installation on the streets of what has become one of the main artists town in the suburbs of Beijing. In a genuine effort to propose something else than one of those recurring installations that too many times do nothing more than being experimental decorative objects, we teamed-up with our friends from CPYA and JML to build what we thought of as a temporary piece of infrastructure. We proposed and implemented a 50 meters long blue "public table" that acted as a piece of equipment inciting informal gatherings, grassroots street's occupation, appropriation and activation, and collectively improvised events.
The length of a table, that could sit 80 people simultaneously, was a conscious embrace of the public and urban scale, an optimistic celebration of togetherness, as well as an experiment into transgression and ambiguity. The material we used to create the 50 meters long strip is the blue coated steel sheet that is used all over China to build temporary structures, transitory shelters, industrial sheds, or workers housing. The use of this cheap, rather low-quality and non-durable material was a way for us to positively utilize the intrinsic quality of temporariness, its materiality, and its validity.
Blue.tmp was literally taken over in a matter of hours by the nearby restaurants, local calligraphers and painters, children, elderly, monks, vegetable and fruits sellers, antiques resellers, visitors and locals happily intermingling. At its peak usage time, the blue table, rendered invisible under the hundreds of things it was carrying, was not big enough and the villagers started improvising and quickly putting up other smaller "baby" tables on 3 wheeled electric bicycles around it. Blue.tmp was finally dismounted after two weeks after the art festival closed its doors.
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