On Sunday artist Jianguo Xiongdi sent the dust he spent 100 days collecting from the Beijing air to a factory in Tangshan, Hebei Province. Now all he had to do was wait three days for the factory to send him back the dust - in brick form.
周日,艺术者“坚果兄弟”将100天来收集的北京雾霾送往河北唐山的一家制砖厂,只等3天后工厂给他寄回一块板砖。
This is part of what he is calling the Dust Project.
这是他“尘埃计划”的一部分。
“The first part of the project was collecting the dust from the air for 100 days. The second part was sending it to the brick factory. For the third part I plan to mix the brick in with ordinary bricks at a construction site. The final step will be watching it disappear into a sea of bricks,” Jianguo Xiongdi told the Global Times. Smiling, he said that he was considering choosing a skyscraper construction site in Beijing’s Central Business District.
“尘埃计划的第一步是收集100天空气中的灰尘,第二步是把收集到的灰尘送到制砖厂,第三步我打算将这块砖用作建筑工地的材料,和其他砖块一样,最后一步就是看着它融入茫茫砖海”,坚果兄弟笑着向环球时报说到,他还在考虑把这块砖用于北京中央商务区某摩天大厦中。
He first began preparing for this project in 2013, when the strong smog in Beijing started raising public concern. However, the project was postponed for two years, leading to the artist picking it up again this year in order to call more attention to air pollution.
他的这个“尘埃计划“始于2013年,当时北京的雾霾天气引起了公众的高度关注。但这一计划推迟了两年,空气污染问题让他在今年重拾该计划,希望以此引起人们对空气污染的更多关注。
“Our city has become a jar of cars, a place surrounded by chemical factories and a giant construction sites. The more we chase things, the more resources we need and the more dust we produce. When all the resources on Earth are exhausted someday, we will become the real dust,” Jianguo Xiongdi writes in the introduction to the Dust Project.
“我们的城市现在成了一个汽车堵城,一个化工围城,一个建筑工城。我们追求的越多,对资源索取的越多,制造的尘埃也就越多。当地球上的资源消耗殆尽之时,我们就成了真正的微尘”,坚果兄弟在”尘埃计划“的介绍中这样写道。
He started collecting the dust on July 24 using an industrial vacuum cleaner with a 0.2 micrometer filter and walking the streets for four hours a day. He said he went out almost every day except for when it rained or snowed. He recorded the entire process on his Sina Weibo account.
从7月24日开始,他就开始用过滤精度为0.2微米的工业真空吸尘器吸尘,每天走在街头4小时,每天坚持出去吸尘,除非是下雨下雪天,他把整个吸尘过程发布在微博上。
“Actually, I only collected about 100 grams of dust. This wasn’t enough to make a brick, so I asked the factory to add some clay,” he told the Global Times.
“事实上,我收集到的100克尘埃是不够制作板砖的,所以我就让工厂加了些制砖的黏土”,他向环球时报说道。
Freelance artist
自由艺术家
Occasionally working as an advertiser and having held several exhibitions in Shenzhen and Beijing, Jianguo Xiongdi said that while some call him an artist, he thinks of himself as just an unemployed guy who cares about society.
坚果兄弟已在深圳和北京举办多次展览,有时也是广告宣传者,坚果兄弟说虽然一些人称他为艺术家,但他觉得自己只是个关心社会的无业者。
His first performance art project, A Bookstore Closed Up in 30 Days, was widely reported on by local media in 2011. Later he established a company called Meaningless, which hired people to do meaningless things such as taking selfies while on the toilet or to ride public transportation and prove to other passengers that they were not psychotic.
他的第一个艺术项目,2011年的“30天就倒闭书店”项目在当地报导很多,之后他成立了一个叫“无意义”的公司,公司雇佣人们做些毫无意义的事,比如在马桶上自拍、在公交或地铁上向乘客证明他们不是神经病等等。
The Shenzhen-based artist has come to Beijing quite frequently in recent years. During his 100-days in Beijing this time, he began 11 art projects, including an exhibition called Beijing Heihua which was held at the Arc Space from September 16 to October 25. The exhibition consisted of a room whose walls were covered in white paper. On the paper the artist has written the cell-phone numbers of 1,000 intermediately agents that he had collected online.
这位深圳艺术者近些年来往北京较为频繁,这次在北京的100天时间里,他开启了11个艺术项目,其中包括一个名“黑化”的展览,9月16日-25日在北京Arc Space(北京唯一一家深入到大学校园社区中的替代性空间,隐藏在老居民楼里的艺术实验场)举办,展示了一个房间,房间四周墙上贴着白纸,纸上写着他在网上联系过的1000个中介的手机号码。
“Many people have been cheated by intermediary agents. So I decided to collect their cell-phone numbers to create an exhibition,” he told the Global Times.
“因为很多人都被中介坑过,所以我决定收集他们的手机号办一场展览”,他这样向环球时报说道。