张思扬
In the city of Taiyuan, there is a ruin. The elderly say it was abandoned due to hauntings, and it has been thirty or forty years. Next to the ruin, in 1990, there was a state-owned rubber factory, which closed in 2017. Later, someone online claimed that in 2013, twelve young people died in the ruins.
Forgetting can be both a betrayal of memory and a necessary condition for constructing history. On the internet, I have built a fracture, a hidden space of memory—images and texts hidden beneath the surface of an ordinary factory website, existing in the gap between history and fiction. Like Edward Soja’s description of Thirdspace, I aim to use cybernetic methods to shape this special heterotopian field into an amorphous intersection of material space, mental space, and social space—a place filled with contradictions, conflicts, and possibilities. I focus on the spread of the haunting story over thirty years, on the place where time flows continuously inside and outside the ruins, and on the hidden, forgotten collective memories beneath the ruins, the decay of the communist legacy witnessed by thirty years. They still whisper.
My story begins with the workers who once lived in the rubber factory within the ruins. They experience the passage of time from the perspective of strangers and the abandoned, glimpsing a faint trace of ghostliness hidden in the decaying era. Time and space gradually flatten into an infinite after they enter the site, facing the traces of past time underground, the disappearance and decay of collective memory. Do those unrealized ideals constantly interrogate reality? They slowly become the ghosts in the rumors, and it seems someone has recorded fragments of words among them. The work uses many broken, realistic images, as if they are from a perspective that should not exist in photography, with a natural rupture from reality. These monumental images expose some "Ça-a-été / That-has-been" memory landscapes, where the points of memory intertwine with textual stories in cybernetic blank spaces, constructing a hyperreal network of ghosts made up of reality, fictional images, historical context, and personal stories.
On the outermost layer, I imagined the now-closed rubber factory’s website. A dysfunctional, ordinary factory website interface becomes a cover for these fragmented spaces, much like the painted skin in folk stories that conceals the wounds and tales behind it.
德里达说："时间脱节了。" (Le temps est désarticulé.)
在太原的城市中，有一片废墟。老人们说它因为闹鬼而废弃，已经三十年，或者四十年。废墟旁，在1990年，曾经有一个国营橡胶厂在这里开办，他在2017年关闭。后来，网上有人说，2013年，十二个年轻人死在了废墟里。
遗忘既可能是对记忆的背叛，也可能是构建历史的必要条件。我在网络上构建了一个断裂，隐藏的记忆场所，一些隐藏在一个寻常的工厂网站外皮下的，在历史和虚构的夹缝之间的影像和文本。如爱德华·索亚 (Edward Soja)描述的第三空间 (Thirdspace)，我希望用赛博化的手段将那片特殊的异托邦场域塑造为一个不定型的，物质空间、精神空间和社会空间的交汇点，一个充满矛盾、冲突和可能性的场所。我关注闹鬼故事三十年期间的流传，关注废墟内外时间不断流动的场所，以及废墟之下隐藏的，被遗忘的共同记忆，被三十年见证的共产主义遗产的衰败，它们仍在呢喃。
我的故事从橡胶厂居住在废墟里的工人出发，他们以陌生者和被弃者的视角经历时间的流逝，在生活中窥见隐藏在衰败时代中的一丝幽灵气息。时间和空间在他们进入场所后逐渐变为扁平的无限，他们面对着地下过去时间的痕迹，集体记忆的消逝和衰败，那些未实现的理想是否不断地拷问着现实？他们逐渐变为传言中的幽灵，而似乎有人在其中记录下了只言片语。这件作品中使用了许多残破而现实的图像，它们仿佛来自一个不该存在的摄影视角，与现实天然的断裂。这些纪念碑性的图像揭露了一些“此曾在” (Ça-a-été / That-has-been)的记忆景观，这些记忆的刺点在赛博的空白空间内与文本性的故事发生关系，构筑起现实，虚构图像，历史语境和个人故事的超真实幽灵网络。
而在最外层，我想象了已经关闭的橡胶厂的网站。一个失去功能的，最普通的工厂网站界面成为了这些碎片空间的掩护，就像民俗故事中供妖怪躲藏的画皮，轻轻掩上其背后的创伤和故事。